Booked for Perdition

The English settlers of my home turf---until the advent of clambakes on the beach, St. Patrick's Day, and the Boston Red Sox---weren't much fun. Given to uttering such grim admonishments as "Virtue is ye own reward" and "Idle hands are ye Devil's tools," they held an even dimmer view of folk who labored or enjoyed themselves on the Sabbath.

Last Sunday, those Bay State sourpusses must have been spinning in their cold, narrow graves because I did both.

Sufficiently obedient to my Puritanical heritage to feel that I must somehow "earn" my collapse on the couch with a book---not the Good One, but a good one---I decided to run barefoot through my bookshelves, weeding my collection for donations for the library book sale. This is no quick-and-easy undertaking: I have caches of books in every room in the house, save the dining room (yet) and the two baths (an oversight). There are books on shelves, in baskets, in crates, on tabletops, stacked on the floor, and I went through them all.

As always, it was a time of rediscoveries and resignations. Why do I own four different editions of "The Canterbury Tales" and two of "The Wind in the Willows?" How did I wind up with two copies of David McCullough's "1776" and have read neither? Do I really want to read this debut novel by a former funeral director which jacket blurbs describe as being in a class with "Six Feet Under?" (No.)

As the fashion gurus advise of clothing not worn for two or three seasons, this was the opportune time to divest myself of all those unread shiny new novels by shiny new novelists that looked appealing when they first came out but aren't really my style.

Some I will hang onto, read or not, because every literate home should have a decent copy of "Madame Bovary" and you never know when you will need a good translation of the "The Iliad" and "The Odyssey." Some, like the elderly hardcovers of Edith Hamilton's "The Greek Way" and F. Scott Fitzgerald's letters to his daughter, will have a home in perpetuity on my shelves because they were rescues from previous years' book sales. If it hadn't been for me, their pages would have been torn from their covers and recycled, and the covers thrown in the trash. I just can't consign them to that fate again; it would be like taking the dog you adopted because you felt sorry for him back to the shelter. Besides, I just might read those books some day.

Naturally, to choose which books go and which stay, I had to read a little of each, so my weeding took the best---and I do mean "best"--- part of the afternoon. All of my Kurt Vonnegut will stay, Sarah Waters will go. I guess I can let Murray Kempton's collections of columns go---but not Molly Ivins' or Mike Royko's. Glad I didn't go for that deluxe edition of the collected Wallace Stevens; I already own one. You will have to pry these "Amphigorey" compilations and the All-American Ads series out of my cold, dead fingers.

I am still undecided about the Sir John Fielding series of mysteries by Bruce Alexander and the Marjorie Eccles and Caroline Graham books I accumulated after I had read one novel by each author and decided in my obssessive-compulsive way that I had to have them all. Maybe I'll give them a year's reprieve, as I did with Reginald Hill and Ian Rankin last year. Which worked out: I have actually been dipping into their books this winter.

At the end of the afternoon, my Sabbath-breaking netted the book sale five liquor-store boxes (Nyah-nyah-nyah, Cotton Mather!) packed with some pretty good stuff, and I had had a perfectly marvelous time.