Project Bookshelf: Kanika Lawton

When my parents moved from Vancouver, Canada to Washington last year, they asked for my help because, in their words, “You’re good at organizing and getting rid of stuff.” It’s true, except it only really applies to clothes; fashion comes and goes, and I don’t fit into a lot of my older clothes now, so I don’t feel a sentimental attachment to them.

I can’t say the same about books. Books helped me get through large parts of my childhood and teenage years, so the thought of letting go of any of them is unthinkable. So much of my life and memories are stitched within their pages, so getting rid of them feels like getting rid of parts of myself.

I’m good at organizing until it comes to my books, which you can see in my little bookshelf in my apartment in Toronto. I moved to Toronto in the summer of 2018 for grad school, studying and teaching cinema studies at the University of Toronto.

A lot of the books here are tied directly to my degree: on one shelf you’ll see books on film criticism and theory, peer-reviewed film journals, Film Art: An Introduction, a textbook I used as an undergrad (my edition has Inglourious Basterds on the cover), an encyclopedia of essential films, and so on. Cinema studies owes a lot to philosophy, so I also have books from Deleuze, Irigaray, Derrida, and Foucault (shout out to one of my friends who helped me complete my collection of Foucault’s History of Sexuality, which brings me to another thing; I have to make sure any books I get in a series match one another!).

Even though a lot of my books here are academic because, well, I moved to Toronto for academics, I also managed to grow my fiction and poetry collections. One thing I love about Toronto is how many used bookstores there are. I can usually be found wandering around BMV Books near campus, leafing through their huge selection of fiction, poetry, and nonfiction books. This is where I was introduced to Claudia Rankine’s Citizen (one of my favorite collections of poetry) and Ursula K. Le Guin’s essays on utopia. Also, since I practically lived in the library while writing my master’s thesis, I took advantage of the library’s numerous used book sales, which is how I got my biographies on the Borgias and Lord Byron. I group anything that isn’t strictly academic together, so this shelf has a nice mix of poetry and short story collections, graphic novels, anthologies, and fiction.

This bookshelf isn’t nearly as big as the one I had in our old house, so I started playing Tetris with my books. You can see them piling on top of one another, and I have stacks of books strewn all around my bedroom. Still, I love growing my own personal library, especially since I can trace who I was through their cherished pages.

This bookshelf holds just a fraction of my collection. I’m currently in our new house in Olympia, Washington, my childhood favorites pushed up against my bedroom walls. I’ve started sorting through the boxes and boxes of books the movers packed for us, reminiscing on how much they impacted me. How many times did I reread Master and Margarita to the point where the spine is falling apart? How many summer days did I spend nose-deep in one of my favorite encyclopedias, absorbing information? (Yes, I collected encyclopedias and books of lists as a child). Just the other day we bought new bookshelves, which will inevitably house the books I’m currently surrounded by. Even so, I can’t help but feel a surge of nostalgic contentment whenever I turn the pages of the books I spent so much of my time with. I can’t part with such memories, especially when I can pick them up whenever I want.

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