Project Bookshelf: Meg Pinkston

I am an awful gift giver. I have never been good at choosing an item to encapsulate my love for someone, never good at the wrapping of it all, and I always ruin the moment that the recipient tears the paper with frantic explanations as to why I thought the thing inside the box was worth giving. It is always a mess. I look at my bookshelf, though, and all I see are gifts. My friends and family all give books as gifts for birthdays and Christmas, offering our used copies for someone else’s. This Christmas, I gave up Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead by Olga Tokarczuk for my uncle’s copy of Devil House by John Darnielle, and it sits on my shelf next to Katherine Dunn’s Toad, another one of his gifts.

I like gifting books because they provide the frantic explanation for me. I can give my mom a copy of Taiye Selasi’s Ghana Must Go and let her read about a family that loses and loves and perseveres, and she can respond with Rachel Yoder’s Nightbitch to say that this loss, love, and tenacity is as old as I am, starting at birth and growing stronger over the years. That communication is subtle and sometimes hard to see, but it is intimate and real and makes the gift giving a purpose I have always struggled to find. My shelf is full of gifts, messages from my loved ones.

My shelf is also home to books that allow me to escape. My favorite brain candy is a thriller, and my friends and I pass around the same copies until they are cracked and creased beyond recognition. I recently received Lucy Foley’s The Midnight Feast, gifted by a friend who loves to devour a thriller fueled by bad choices. In exchange, I gave her The Guest by Emma Cline. We live several states apart and have lost the luxury of a shared social circle, our daily lives defined by the new friends and environment that college provides, so the books we share fills the gaps. These stories of messes and mistakes become our gossip, our shared experiences shifting from school cafeteria to hardbacks shipped with notes in the margins.

The bookshelf in my college apartment is missing a lot of my favorites. It is small and hardback books have to sit at an angle to fit. However, it holds messages from the people I love. With every book I receive and cram into these two shelves, I learn something new about my friends and family, and with every book I gift, I share part of myself.

Meg Pinkston is a maker of crafts, stories, and foods from East Tennessee, her creations all heavily influenced by her Appalachian roots. She is a sophomore at the University of Tennessee pursuing a degree in English with a minor in Political Science. In her free time, Meg can be found scuba diving and writing essays exploring the complexities of the American South.