Leah Price (ed): Unpacking My Library: Writers and Their Books

Abstract

Think of this as Playboy for bibliophiles. Dozens of full-page, high resolution photographs will have you tilting Unpacking My Library on its side to better admire the stacks and shelves of thirteen authors from a variety of genres. Supporting interviews tell you when the authors bought their first books, how they arrange their books, and what books they keep on their bedside tables. Leah Price, professor of English at Harvard, has put together a captivating little collection that will leave you wanting more. Six of the thirteen authors included in Unpacking My Library—Rebecca Goldstein and Steven Pinker, Lev Grossman and Sophie Gee, and Claire Messud and James Wood—are couples and were chaptered together but interviewed separately. Each couple interviewed maintains shared libraries, so for each, there is a single photo set. The remaining seven authors included are Alison Bechdel, Stephen Carter, Junot Diaz, Jonathan Lethem, Philip Pullman, Gary Shteyngart, and Edmund White. Most exciting to me was the chapter with Pullman, author of His Dark Materials, one of my favorite series growing up. Pullman is the only author featured in Unpacking My Library who wrote an essay response instead of answering each of Price’s questions in turn and it’s nice to read his words uninterrupted. That said, Price asks great questions. Have you ever in your life given up reading? Uniformly not. How do you dispose of unwanted books? Bechdel keeps them, Diaz gives his away, Grossman and Gee put theirs out on the curb, Shteyngart uses the trash. How do you arrange your books? Jonathan Lethem ‘‘oscillate[s] between alphabetical absolutism and imperatives of genre, size, color, [and] publisher’’ (114). Authors were also asked about their shelving arrangements. Pinker stores his books in stackable cubes in order to avoid ‘‘those awful things called bookends’’