We’re in the middle of a major decluttering (are we ever not decluttering? Do we ever move into a state of being uncluttered?). We live in a two-up two-down with very little storage, and we’re stuff people, favouring an interiors aesthetic that could be described as layered. By which I mean many piles of things around the place.
I still remember the first time I saw my college boyfriend’s astoundingly tidy bedroom and thinking I didn’t realise surfaces could be…entirely empty? Just nothing on them. Two in one room, a desk, and a built-in dressing table, free from anything. Astonishing.
Of late, I fear the clutter is in danger of having veered into the kind of territory where you become used to a level that is tantamount to making your house a slightly smaller living space, but you yourself no longer see it. Excuse the squash, bags ready for the charity shop, I’ve said to everyone who has passed slightly awkwardly through our hallway for the past six or so months.
And so we’re decluttering, again.
As part of my work, I receive proofs of soon-to-be-published books all the time. Which is a wonderful perk. But also contributes to the clutter. There are piles of books everywhere. On shelves obviously, but also bedside tables, coffee tables, the stairs, the hall table, the kitchen table, a corner of my desk, in bags in the boot of my car (these last slowly making their way to the charity shop).
When I was first looking for a house, a place to put my books was one of the things I was specifically really excited about. Laying out the collection I had so far amassed, which stayed in my parents’ home while I was living in various rented houses around Dublin in my mid-twenties, because carting them around from house to house was a pain, onto shelves in a home I owned felt really satisfying. Properly putting down roots, making a permanent home.
Now our bookshelves have the books I had at the time, and ones I’ve added since. Only special books make it to the bookshelves, the ones I can’t let go of (the rest lie in piles about the house, read, but not keepers, intended eventually for a charity run). I told my friend Sophie about this piece last week, and when I was describing these books she called them your DNA books, because she has a genius for titles (when I worked in a newsroom, we would on occasion call her if it was felt a headline for the culture section wasn’t quite there. Invariably she would come up with something better). DNA books are the ones you’ll never let go of you because you want to be able to revert to them, for a comfort read, or because they were given to you by someone special, and that gives them meaning, or because they are a sort of reference-on-how-to-live type book. In some way, they’re part of you. There’s an heirloom heritage aspect to it beyond what’s in the book. Sometimes they are books that are a sort of shorthand for what it is to be a member of your family (in the same way you might sum up a family by the music they listened to, ours would be Bob Dylan, Van Morrison, Handel, Mozart (music teacher mother), and for a summer when I was a teenager, Nirvana, one side of a tape of whose music they all tolerated when it was my turn to choose on a drive to Kerry).
When I first became a shelf owner, I wanted to put the huge anthologies I had bought (and admittedly barely read) while studying English literature on the shelf (if I’m honest, as much because I really like their cover artwork).
My collection of Agatha Christie’s entire back catalogue (I got one every Christmas and spent the afternoon while we waited for dinner reading it, I still remember the last time I started a Christie I hadn’t yet read, feeling so sad I’d never get to do that again).
Alexander McCall Smith books a relative who has since died gave me. Fashion coffee table books passed on by an editor who was clearing out her office in the beautiful old Independent House building on Abbey Street. Books my friends Sophie and Emily have written. Occasionally a book by someone I interviewed who left a lasting impact. The books I wrote myself.
The books on my shelves I value most are the collections that began from a book I took as a teenager from my parents’ home. P.G. Wodehouse, and John Mortimer’s Rumpole of the Bailey (see pictured above).
Remember before there were Kindles and you’d just read whatever was on the bookshelves at home, an older cousin said to me a while ago. I couldn’t stop thinking about it afterwards. When you were a voracious reader as a kid, you just read what was there. In my house that meant war histories, Tim Pat Coogan’s biography of Michael Collins, an occasional true life crime bio. But the two that really stuck to the point where I nicked them for my own were Wodehouse and Mortimer. Like Christie, comfort reads I go back to again and again. DNA books.
On a lower shelf there is a collection of books I’ve been putting together for my daughter since she was young, a sort of being-a-human frame of reference, everything from how babies are made to how the planet was formed.
It was during a previous bout of decluttering that these books made me think about the books I want my daughter to find on our bookshelves as she gets older (casually, and not at all as if her mother has planned it. We can hope she never reads this). A sort of frame of reference for a teenage girl.
Louise O’Neill’s The Surface Breaks: a Reimagining of The Little Mermaid started it. I was going through the shelves finding books that weren’t keepers. This is a version of this story I want my daughter to have. My aunt Veronica, who always bought us the best books when we were kids, gave me Roald Dahl’s Revolting Rhymes, and I remember the sense of a world of previously unconsidered possibilities opening up, where people went from being passive to often quite hacked-off, but ultimately very active and impressive, protagonists. A feeling of being shown an entirely different way that things could be. This is what Louise’s book does and I want that for my daughter.
I’ve recently read Marian Keyes’ My Favourite Mistake (brilliant, obviously), and now I’m looking for her back catalogue in charity shops to both reread myself and have for my daughter. The Aisling books are there on our shelves, Louise Nealon’s Snowflake. Some Bill Bryson. All The President’s Men and Bonfire of the Vanities, two of my all-time favourite books, both nicked from my father. Donna Tartt’s The Secret History (I envy anyone reading this for the first time). Caitlin Moran, Isabel Allende. Emilie Pine’s Notes to Self, and some of Bryony Gordon’s books.
A few years ago, we got stuck in a bedtime reading rut of reading the same Spot (the dog) story every night. It had become a sort of nostalgia comfort crutch, the kind of thing you cleaved to in the latter days of covid, worn out and needing things that felt safe and comforting. But this had gone too far.
I cannot take this it anymore, I thought one night, almost deafened by my own inner scream. I literally cannot read this book ever again.
I ordered Little Women. In hindsight, Spot to Jo March was an overly ambitious leap. Initially things went well though, with a certain amount of judicious on-the-spot editing as I read (the Pilgrim’s Progress pieces had to go). She loved the characters, the play, the imagination of Jo. But we got bogged down as the sisters got older and talk turned regularly to admonishments of vanity and marriage plans, and it was abandoned. But it’s on the shelf, along with my Leaving Cert copy of Wuthering Heights.
We’re now reading Anne of Green Gables at bedtime. I love seeing my daughter soak up a book I loved as a kid and returned to as a teenager. When I was 15, I visited the real Green Gables house in Prince Edward Island, the inspiration for the setting of the books, with the aunt who gave me my first Agatha Christie book. I remember the sense of escapism at the time, from being a teenager, and all the social on-ness and pressure that came with that. As if a weight had been temporarily lifted and I could just be, in the company of my aunt, at this rural spot that had managed to retain a sense of being away from it all. A feeling of escape. Exactly what all these books, that will never be decluttered from our shelves, provide.
You, Sophie,Marian and louise are all on my shelf!🥰along with Doireann ni griofa,def one for daughters.
I am ruthless now. I only keep books I haven't read or like you ones that mean something to me. I have three books autographed - one by John Banville. My aunt who is an author were having coffee and spotted him. I happened to have his Crime Book under his Benjamin Black pseudonym. But I have read everything he has written. And I just loved he too wad a crime need like me. Just as I am that you too like crime - oh Agatha Christie! My aunt told me "He'll tell you to FUCK OFF" Yet another reason I liked him as I too would probably say the same if a fawning fan interrupted my grub. I excited told her I can't wait for him to tell me FUCK OFF. And I approached him told him what my favourite book of his is -Birchwood- and my love of crime, and here I am with his very own book. He signed it agreeing tis indeed a coincidence and my aunt nearly feel off her chair! The second one is of my friend's book "Mind On Fire' which has the best opening to a novel inhave read yet, he nonchalantly uttered that he never autographs books "because I have terrible hand writing!". And the third is by a palaeontologist who write "Always stay geeky" to my son who was three and knew what a Thyrazensaurous was when he was 3- can't throw that out ❤️. I never thought of keeping books for him to read.... I am going to start doing that though. What a great idea!