These Are the Books of Our Lives

Alright, I'm down to about 75 books. I think I need to look through them and muse a bit, and then I'll post the list. In the meantime, here's our last philosophical thinks upon sorting through the books...

WRITING IN BOOKS

My Grandfather

he was the English lit prof who gave me so many of my old-lit books

easy to recognise his handwriting, it's tiny and near illegible

His wife, my grandmother

she died of breast cancer before I was born

Their daughter, my mother

Her brother

 

Fernando

Moi

 

PARTING IS SUCH SWEET SORROW

It's harder to part with books that were my grandfather's--the Miltons and Chaucers and Elizabethan plays. Or books I read in university or college and enjoyed, like all the romances--Sir Gawain, Chretien de Troyes, The Song of Roland, the Canterbury Tales. I was contemplating Tristan and Iseult, which I've never read, and two reviews on Goodreads were praising the person who read it at Librivox (which I gather does audios of varying quality.) Which reminded me of the pleasure I took in listening to Chaucer in the car, eons ago, and decided it's probably the way to go.

So they all went. Except this teeny volume of Dante...

...because in the fly leaf my grandfather wrote that he bought it in Italy in 1945--which is where he was stationed in WWII. So Dante made it.

Even though I'd already chosen to keep the Dante he gave me in 1989 with Dore illustrations.

Which I keep next to the annotated Christmas Carol I stole from my father and used so much it's falling apart. (I even visited the graveyard pictured here, on London.)

 

I also kept my destroyed Friday's Child, though I have a better copy, cause it was the first Heyer I read. Picked up at a second hand store in Kingston by my mum, and casually tossed on the staircase: "I got this for you, you'll like it."

 

THE MARKERS OF OUR TOMES

Today's collection of bookmarks, including a plane ticket, a card from my brother, a security tag, a photo of Stratford Upon Avon, a 1990 calendar from my old church showing the holy days, the words to The Rose, a page from a course calendar, and a newspaper clipping from my mother adverising a church that "is not like spinach!"