A columnist for the Guardian suggests it is, and she is getting rid of her own books.
Sometimes when I read an opinion piece I wonder how sincerely the writer believes what they wrote, and how much of it was written to provoke.
I wondered this the other morning after reading an opinion piece in the Guardian of London by a writer named Rhiannon Lucy Cosslett. (You can find the column at http://bit.ly/3HswK0F) I wasn't familiar with her, but Google tells me she is the author of a novel called "The Tyranny of Lost Things" as well as a memoir about her cat.
In the Guardian, she wrote about how she is getting rid of her books. After finishing a book, "Why keep it on my shelves when I'm finished, when someone else could delight in it as I did?" she writes. I get this — there is real joy in giving away books.
But then the column began to take a strange, judgmental turn. She might give a book away, she said, or she might toss it into a recycle bin if she deems it "really objectionable." This makes me twitchy (the banning of "Maus" and other books comes to mind).
Where she really lost me, though, was when she began to judge others for not getting rid of their books. The "cult" of book ownership, she writes, is "smug and middle-class." (To which I say: Whoa, what's wrong with being middle-class?)
She goes on to draw sweeping conclusions about people who own books — many of them brag about "having a lot of books ... treating having a lot of books as a stand-in for your personality, or believing that simply owning a lot of books makes one 'know things.' "
This made me deeply uncomfortable, and not just because I happen to own a lot of books. That kind of broad-brush leap from seeing books in a person's house to deciding that that means the person is vain and shallow seemed inordinately unfair. Downright smug, I'd say.
Judging from the comments on the Guardian site and on Twitter, Cosslett got a lot of backlash for this column, which bothered her. (The headline changed over the course of the day from one that used the words "cult" and "smug" to one that was much milder, and the Guardian turned off comments.)
Still, her words made me think: Is there a bit of superiority in those of us who have a lot of books? Do we look down on people who don't have books? Do we think owning a lot of books makes us somehow better than someone who owns a lot of something else — Hummel figurines, maybe? Or DVDs?
All I can tell you is that I am grateful that I grew up in a house full of books, in a home that valued reading. It meant a lot to browse my older sisters' shelves and borrow books that were beyond my understanding, and to sit for hours in the basement room where my father kept the texts he taught at the university and try to puzzle out Shakespeare.
I don't think a house full of books is a sign of pretension. In my experience, a house full of books simply means that a person who loves books lives there.
I would love your thoughts on all of this. It's easy to flame Cosslett, but her column did make me stop and think, and that is a good thing. Write me at books@startribune.com.
