Like most young(ish?) people, I tend to move every few years, from apartment to apartment to house and back to apartment. I'll be the absolute first person to tell you that I hate moving. I'm disorganized at the best of times, so even the most basic step of moving--putting everything in boxes to be carried away--stresses me out to no end. Every time I have moved, from when I was 18 leaving my mother's home to the last time I moved from Lake Charles to Baton Rouge I feel like I've thrown more things away than I've packed. Yet with each moved it felt like I had more and more things to move. Furniture and appliances and oh god the never ending piles of clothes than I never could have possibly worn in my entire life. Everything seems to multiply and flood out when you move, like the hex in Belatrix's vault. It's maddening, especially for a guy like me, and I'm always willing to just take huge armloads of things and throw them in the garbage rather than bother packing them.
Without a doubt the worst thing in the world to move are books. They are basically paper bricks, after all, dense little pages all clumped together between hard, heavy covers. They do pack into boxes nicely, but their weight is so great that not even big awkward couches can compete with the difficulty of hauling a cardboard box filled with fifteen or twenty paperbacks up a flight of stairs. And I have many more than fifteen or twenty paperbacks. Hell, I have that many role playing books alone. Every time I move I load up my ten or twenty or thirty boxes with books and haul each heavy, smelly load in and out of trucks and rooms and halls even as I am throwing clothes and hangers and food and beds out of windows and into streets.
These days ebooks are rapidly replacing these proverbial albatrosses, people can move their whole home library as easily as they could move a single slim novel. It is hard to argue with this logic when I'm sweating and cursing over a third box of these fucking books and knowing that I still have five more to get out of the truck back there. Even once all the boxes are in the new abode, one still has to move in bookshelves and open the boxes up and line all the books back into their proper places and be careful not to bend the covers or break the spines anymore than one needs to.
But I can never bring myself to throw away my books, even the ones I don't really like that much.
Why not? I know I could get them all on a Kindle or a Nook, or even my phone. There are old, cliche arguments like "Books smell like books!" or "I like to turn pages!" (both of these are true, and I believe in them whole-heartedly, but I can absolutely understand that the ebook crowd are tired of hearing them. Even I am. Sometimes.)
The truth is that, for me--for many people, I think--books represent something more than simply the text printed on their paper. When I lie on my bed and look over at my bright orange book case I'm not just seeing the spine of The Truce at Bakura, I'm remembering sitting in the backseat of my mom's van as we drove to Houston. I'm feeling the thrum of the road under me, smelling the McDonald's we ate on the road, and remembering Luke Skywalker struggling weightless through the Ssi-ruuk capital ship while trying to save Dev Sibwarra and himself from the raptor-like aliens.
Each of my books is a snatch of my life, a memory made concrete--imprinted by me even as it imprinted its story on to me. I'll always connect Wizard and Glass with the musty old couch in my older brother's house where I found it and devoured it. Watership Down will always remind me of clouds scudding across a beautiful star-shot night as I read it under the pale light of a full moon. Dealing with Dragons, Sabriel, and The Passage will all remind me of various lovers anytime I see them or feel their pages.
For me, and I suspect many people, my books are much more than just the stories they hold. They're the stories of me. Each crease, each stain, each ragged page--they're all part of my life, like old scars that remind us of adventures or tragedies. My books hold and tell the story of me, more than my clothes or my bed stand or my microwave. I could never willingly give away these things, anymore than I would be willing to part with my memories of my past--be they good or bad--because ultimately all that I am is my experiences, and I want to remember who I am and why I am and these heavy, cumbersome, space-consuming books are the representation of my own mind in the physical world.
Plus, hey, they smell like books.
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