Lexicon of Love*

Dining Room

It might not be the first thing you notice, but if you’ve ever visited someone who has no books in her home, you can feel it. The house is soulless. Even if you don’t read, the display of books is essential—even more than that of the obligatory plant. My sister had a dinner party shortly after a dusty renovation. It took me a few minutes to figure out what was wrong. Maybe the lack of books was buffered by an African violet. But something felt off. It wasn't until after dessert, when I was slouched over a cake in the pass-through, that I noticed a pair of jester bookends on the new built-in buffet, turned the wrong direction, supporting nothing. Now they sandwich several first edition volumes of The Wizard of Oz series. And thank heavens her home's soul has been restored, as the violet is suffering.

My home is a library. Only three rooms lack a bookcase, though two of them have books and magazines on the toilet tank lid. Even our hallway, not technically a room, has a case with 200 books. All my husband's. All philosophy.

The last major decor change in our home involved the banishment of a two-ton, blue-painted bookcase from the living room and the installation of four Ikea bookshelves in the dining room. My husband scavenged the living room behemoth—and lots of other discarded furniture—from a curb at Johns Hopkins University when they remodeled the dorms twenty years ago. It now resides in the basement, filled with song- and crafts books.

The living room may be shelf-less now, but a Shakespeare tome—at seven pounds, a coffee-table book if ever there was one—sits near the sofa, and a pair of bookends props up some poetry favorites (Neruda, for one). The dining room now holds nearly 450 books and 200 CDs—books about writing, books for teaching, diet books, coloring books, fiction, current nonfiction, travelogues, essays, reference books, and an entire set of Man, Myth, & Magic—the hardcover and the magazines. In the kitchen, a narrow unit holds about forty cookbooks and a small television. The guest bedroom houses my poetry collection, including first editions of Frank O'Hara's Complete Works and Oscar Wilde’s poem, “The Ballad of Reading Gaol.” My daughter’s room has a growing Goosebumps and Beverly Cleary collection. My bedroom is full of spiritual books and social criticism.

The attic is lined, wall-to-wall, with belly-button-high shelves. They are not yet filled with the hundreds of boxed books that have been stored in the eaves since we moved here. Soon, the attic will smell of the must of suffocated paper as the pages take their first breath in twelve years.

dictionary

In every room of the house, except the bathrooms, you will find a dictionary. My favorite, for its content, is the Random House College Dictionary, revised in 1980. The spine is peeled, and the top has a stain in the shape of a vagina or an eye, either of which is an appropriate stain for a dictionary. My favorite, for its pictures, is the American Heritage. I collect versions of dictionaries the way some people collect bibles. (I hear Nietzsche calling down to me from the hallway’s Twilight of the Idols: “I am afraid [you] are not rid of God because [you] still have faith in grammar.”)

The last book I bought was one for school: Anne Patchett’s Truth and Beauty. It was a good, strong narrative, but the grammar bothered me terribly. For pleasure, in Moab, Utah, I bought The Poet and the Murderer, by Simon Worrall, about Emily Dickenson and her forger (it’s my bedtime book this week), and a book of poems by Sherman Alexie, a Coeur d’Alene Indian whose poetry and prose is beyond anything I could imagine: “Let us now celebrate the poet / who put the shotgun to his head / and blew his genius brains / into a glass of orange juice,” he writes in One Stick Song; “Let us always celebrate the poets.”

I finished reading The Kite Runner last week. As good as it is, it is nothing special, nothing, say, near the quality of Middlesex (Jeffrey Eugenides’ Pullitzer Prize winner) or Louise Erdrich’s The Beet Queen.

Though it is hard to pick favorite books—they change tomorrow and back again next week—it’s easy to identify the books that in some way changed me. For instance, where would any girl be without Judy Blume, whose Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret gave me an inkling, one scary day in sixth grade, that the blood on my gym bloomers didn’t come from the uneven parallel bars?

And what about the first book to understand me—and billions of other American teens: Catcher in the Rye? And what about the first book that made me have to shut my eyes against so many painful words: The Painted Bird, by Jerzy Kozinski?

Each book we read affects us in some way, even if we don’t notice it at once. You can’t single out a handful without slighting the rest. I could say The Orchid Thief taught me that nonfiction could be as gripping as a novel, but I’d learned that earlier, from reading The Professor and the Madman, about the men who produced the first Oxford dictionary, and The Perfect Vehicle, Melissa Pierson’s memoir about her love affair with motorcycles. I could say that Joan Didion gave me my first clue about who I would become, but I didn’t know it at the time; I thought I’d come closer to Anne Sexton or Elizabeth Bishop. I could say that Kurt Vonnegut is the god of us all. But I would be ignoring one author who saved my life or another one who made me contemplate suicide.

And so I return to the dictionary, the book that helped me understand every book I’ve ever read. It’s my exterior brain. It houses bones, fracture, synchronicity, silhouette, chartreuse, cornucopia, redolent, ooze, coconut, avocado, and flesh. It stores synecdoche, refrigerator, cunt, water, lawyer, ambulance, and falsetto. It is my book of all books. It is the best friend I didn’t marry, the short-on-style, long-on-substance nerd who’s always there for me. It’s my lexicon of love.

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* For some ab-fab eighties disco, hear ABC’s Lexicon of Love.

This book meme was passed to me from Brownie and is being passed now to Mike.