I solemnly swear I have more books than this and that I am a good English major. I’m at college for the summer, though, so my bookshelf is limited to whatever I can store between semesters in the bottom of my giant cardboard box. This limits the quantity of books I can carry, but it also means every book you see on this shelf has stuck with me for a specific reason. If there was no reason to keep it, I would have given it away to a thrift store long ago. It’d be easier to pack light.
Some of these are college books I couldn’t bear to leave behind, like The Canterbury Tales, The Odyssey, and Things Fall Apart. I left so many notes in these books that they feel personalized, more like journals than school books. Four summers ago, I took my dad’s old copy of Henry David Thoreau’s Walden to camp with me, and as I read it, I saw all his annotations from when my dad was in college. I hold onto some of my books now because I want to leave little pieces of myself for my kids to discover one day. Sometimes I write funny comments in the margins hoping my kids will see them far in the future. I hope they never have to read The Canterbury Tales, but if they ever do, my copy will be waiting.
Some of these are little books my parents have sent me from home. A Halloween Scare in Minnesota, for example, is a picture book my parents sent me during my first Halloween away from home. It’s just this boring prewritten script with a bunch of Minnesotan place names pasted in, but it was something from home. I get so lonely on holidays away from home thinking about our old traditions (carving pumpkins while watching the Halloween SNL together) that any reminder of home brings me comfort. Even if that scrap is a pandery book about ghouls in Duluth.
The heart of my bookshelf are the books by Junot Díaz, Barbara Kingsolver, and Richard Powers. These are my favorite authors, and I want to write like them. Junot Díaz writes in this beautifully profane bilingual style that ranges somewhere between poetry and prose. He taught me my favorite Spanish swear words, little bits I like to whisper under my breath. Díaz speaks plainly and uses his humor sparingly but sharply, just like I try to in my poems. Barbara Kingsolver is one of my mom’s favorite authors, and she writes characters like no one I’ve ever seen. Maybe it’s that I know my mom loves her books too, but Kingsolver feels like home.
My favorite Richard Powers book is back in Minnesota, but I’ll talk about it because it’s always on my mental bookshelf. In senior year of high school, my dog died and my girlfriend broke up with me in the span of 48 hours. That weekend, I went up north for a Nordic ski race with my high school team. While my teammates played cards in the middle of the room, I laid down on my bunk and read The Overstory while looking out the window at the prettiest snow-covered forest I’d ever seen. The Overstory talks about trees in the gentlest, most weaving language I’ve read from any author. It gave me this feeling of peace that nothing else could have.
On the far left, you’ll see four literary magazines. These are magazines where my poetry appears. I am mimicking Powers and Díaz and Kingsolver and all the others, trying to build my own comfort and lie with it in the woods when my whole life is in pieces outside the door. My writing is all about self-reliance, learning to comfort myself in hard times.
I hope this section grows.
My bookshelf is going to grow and shrink in the next couple years, and maybe it’ll all burn to ashes when another student leaves his hibachi grill on (this actually burned down a dorm on my campus once). All I know is that every book on this shelf makes me feel at home, and even if it’s all gone tomorrow, I keep that feeling with me.
Take that, hibachi grill.
Scott Sorensen is a junior at Dartmouth College studying English while performing standup, writing for the Dartmouth Jack-O-Lantern satire magazine, and helping edit the Stonefence Review. Scott dreams of becoming the first Latvian man to win an MMA championship, which is pretty unlikely given the fact that he is not Latvian and has no idea how to fight.
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