Pustakam ki Mala: 108 Books That Formed Me

Several years ago I moved to my current home in Slackwater, outside of Millersville, Pennsylvania. At that time I found it convenient to package most of my belongings in boxes designed to hold 10 reams of paper. I had about eighty-five boxes, with all sorts of materials in them: manuscripts, correspondence, office supplies, bolt cloth, musical equipment, drawing and painting supplies, botanical and geological samples, and so on. I cultivated the idea that I would write a story based on the content of each of the boxes, explaining the significance of the items to me, and after having written this, I would feel free to sell, give away, or otherwise dispose of the contents, freeing myself of the physical burden of boxes upon boxes of stuff.

What I did in the end was give away or burn boxes upon boxes of stuff without the intermediate step, whittling the collection down to about fifty boxes, which still strikes me as being too much. In addition, I left my position at the Pennsylvania College of Art & Design and therefore brought half of my collection of books home (the other half I gave away): something like a thousand volumes line the hallway and two rooms of the apartment. Part of me feels that I have culled the collection as much as I dare: I frequently search for a reference in a bound volume, rather than conducting a side internet search. Yet part of me feels like the books are a burden: I have to vacuum them frequently, as they are on the floor, and the Brown Marmorated Stink Bugs who have taken up residence in the apartment in droves cluster behind them.

So, the notion of a story about boxes has become a notion of an annotated bibliography of books that have been significance in my life. I like the notion of 108 books, connecting with the number of beads on a japa-mala (which typically has also a "head-bead", bringing the total to 109). 108 books seems to be a plentiful supply, almost too many to be really significant books. I suppose it depends on how one interprets "significant".

I have been surprised as I proceeded with making lists of 108 books how wide-ranging the books were, and as I tried to gather bibliographic information on them I was surprised, too, at how pathetic certain of the books seemed which in my memory were so wonderful.

I am not, therefore, presenting a canon of standard school texts, or necessarily even books that I would recommend -- although some of them I certainly do recommend as standard school texts, or as classics which should be widely if not universally read. I am also not presenting the texts in any kind of strict order of importance or chronological sequence of my reading of them. I hope to begin and end with particularly significant books, but I suppose in the middle passages some of the selections may seem odd or weak, or present just to fill the required number, like party-guests at Bilbo's eleventy-first. These will prove themselves, nonetheless, in some way or other.

And so, to the books.