Life Stories

On the afterlife of books

I look along my bookshelves and every spine tells a story. They tell me where I bought it or who gave it to me. They remind me who lent it to me, and that I really should get around to returning it one day. They return me to train journeys, to places that were once home, to people who lived there and are now gone. They tell me where I read it, who I was with, and how it made me think. They remind me who I was when I read them.

If books were simply vessels for stories then our relationship with them would be easier to manage. Easier to end. But they are not. They are memory made solid. They are time you can hold in your hands.

Books are full of voices, each demanding attention. Some seduce or enchant. Others irritate or provoke. They inspire us. They argue with us. They shape us. They outlast us.

Bound up in books are not just pages, but our relationships with other people. Some are dead and some are living. The novel a friend pressed into your hands because it would ‘change your life’. The essays you debated over as a student. The slim volume with the unexpected twist that opened a conversation with a stranger. The book you read aloud to your mother when she was dying.

My mum loved books. For all those reasons and more. She loved talking about them, lending them, giving them away. She taught me to read; surely the greatest gift of all. She read to me every night when I was a child, and I did the same with our own son. Then, when macular degeneration took reading from her, I read to her.

After her funeral I sat in her chair, in her house, looking around. I looked at the ornaments, the photographs, the furniture: all familiar, all holding their own meanings and associations. They spoke of where she had been and who mattered to her. They were reminders of a life well lived.

But when my gaze turned to the bookshelves I saw the woman who had lived that life. Her books were not merely possessions; they were her interests, her passions, her pleasures. In a room full of her books, she was present. They did not merely define her. They were all of her that I had left.

Boxing them up was harder than I expected. But like everything else, their time here was done.

We became regular visitors to the Oxfam second-hand bookshop. As we arrived with yet another carload, the man at the counter joked about the eighteen-room mansion we must be emptying. By then we had begun clearing some of our own shelves too. If it was good enough for my mum, it was good enough for us.

Yes, books are full of voices. They shape us. But do we need all of them? Do I want our son to face the same task one day, exorcising shelf after shelf of inherited ghosts? The book that changed my life at sixteen: do I still need it now? I’ve managed to slim my clothes down to a capsule wardrobe, so what does my capsule library look like?

The answer, it turns out, is about half the size it was before. Leaner shelves. Books I would reach for again. Dealing with my mum’s possessions forced us to look hard at our own. Have nothing in your home that you do not know to be useful, or believe to be beautiful. That applies to books as much as anything else.

It still doesn’t make it easy.

Saying goodbye to a person’s body is the easier part. It is shaped by ritual, managed by professionals. It brings people together, and there’s sandwiches afterwards. Tears, certainly. But also laughter and shared stories. And so it was with my mum. Letters arrived describing the ways she had changed lives, and given people a hand up.

The other goodbye is different. It concerns the small material world someone leaves behind. Their house. Their drawers. Their books. There are no rituals here. No gatherings. No sandwiches. No shared memories. Just solicitors, estate agents, auctioneers, charity collectors. It is efficient and practical. We clear it and move on. Which is what we did.

Today marks a year since she died; an anniversary I had half hoped to ignore. Two days ago a letter arrived from Oxfam. Sales from her books have raised £748. With Gift Aid, £935. I read the figure twice.

We rarely think about what happens once we let things go. But somebody chose those books. Somebody carried them home. They ended up on somebody’s bookshelf. And in doing so, they invested in another person’s future in another part of the world.

The books that shaped my mum’s life, and ours, are now at work elsewhere. They have entered other homes, other hands, other lives. They will provoke, delight, inspire, irritate and argue all over again. That feels right.

The life of books is longer than ours. We are only their guardians for a while. Our task is not to keep them forever, but to pass them on when our time with them is done.

I’m agnostic about what happens after we die. I don’t pretend to know. But I do know this.

Stories move on.

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