Felicia Bonaparte
New York City, USA
Tell us about your bookcase
Before I moved to my current apartment, which was about 20 years ago, I had a very large house in New Jersey and pretty much every inch of wall space was covered with books. My current apartment, which is a studio, has very little wall space but I have saved the longest wall, 22’ 2”, for as many books as I could bring with me. The rest, about 80% of what I had, I had either to give away, mostly to students who have made very happy homes for them, or, if I absolutely could not part with them, to put in storage.
I bought new bookshelves for this apartment because I wanted very deep shelves which I was lucky enough to find, in teak, at Work-Bench, a wonderful store that is now out of business. My old bookshelves had my books arranged alphabetically and side by side but it occurred to me that I might double the number of books I could house if I could set up one row on a wide shelf side by side but also put other books in front of them and, if I didn’t always insist on an alphabetic arrangement, even create space above the books to pile up more. As you see, that’s what I’ve done, as much as I thought the shelves could bear.
Talk us through your library
As you might imagine, it was enormously difficult—painfully difficult—to decide what books not to bring with me. But I didn’t have all that much choice. I retired when I turned 80, two years ago, but I was still teaching when I moved and I had to select the books that I needed both for my classes and for my own research and writing. The subject I taught was always literature, and it still is what I write about, but from the perspective of its ideas and with a strong interest in how literatures are alike and different in different times and places, so that a good number of books in philosophy and in history had to come with them as well and a few clusters in subjects like art, music, etc. I have a number of areas I focus on and most of the books I brought concentrate on them: mainly nineteenth-century English literature, the literature of ancient Greece, Shakespeare, the literature of the English Renaissance, the history of drama, the literatures of the last few centuries in France, Germany, and the United States, and various smaller clusters such as the Middle Ages in France.
I have to confess, though, that my decision on what to bring with me was partly modified by what books I found available in digital copies on the internet. In my heart a digital copy can never replace a physical book but since space was at a premium digital texts gave me the choice of having more books rather than fewer. And over the years I’ve kept making that same choice and giving physical books away if I could find a good digital copy. I now have several thousand digital books saved on external hard drives. Needless to say, a book I’ve marked up is one I would never exchange for a digital.
How have you organised your books?
“Organized” is much too noble a word for how my books are arranged but my aim was to cluster them first by subject and within subjects to alphabetize them. But, as I said, if alphabetizing interferes with my leaving room for more books to fit on the shelf, I’ll abandon it in a second, which accounts, of course, for the many hours I’ve spent over the years hunting for a book I know I have but can’t for the life of me find.
Have you read them all?
Not counting things like dictionaries, of which I have a good number in a variety of languages, I have read pretty much everything and reread a good number as well. I find great books, and even some others, have this uncanny ability to rewrite themselves between readings. I loved Moby Dick so much when I read it at the age of 20 that I remembered huge passages by heart and was sure there was nothing there that I hadn’t noticed or understood. Wrong! I reread it some 20 years later and to my amazement Herman Melville had somehow crept into my house and rewritten many things in it. Same thing 20 years beyond that. At 80 I reread his Pierre which I hadn’t much liked years earlier only to find that it was, if possible, a novel even greater than Moby Dick. It’s not that I believe that as a reader I’m IN the text, making its meaning up each time I read it. It’s just that great writers seem always ahead of us and we have to kind of grow into getting them.
Oldest book
I buy an awful lot of used books and one – the three annual volumes of the journal The Athenaeum, founded in 1798 by Friedrich and August Wilhelm Schlegel – which I had been looking to buy for at least 40 years (even most libraries didn’t have copies) I suddenly found available about fifteen years ago at Abebooks, in three volumes published in Berlin in the three consecutive years they were written. Technically, it’s a first edition but the binding is in such terrible shape it isn’t worth much in the marketplace. But since I consider the Schlegel brothers the inventors of the nineteenth century, I wouldn’t part with it for pure gold.
Newest book
Many of my newest books are not on my shelves but on my Kindle, but on my shelves the newest, I think, is Scalia Speaks by Antonin Scalia, a collection of the thoughts, speeches, etc, of the Supreme Court Justice published in 2017. It was a gift from a friend who knew that as an immigrant to this country, and having lived in many others that I would not recommend, I have a passionate interest in the American Constitution (a copy of which is always in my handbag) and I always follow the decisions and writings of our Supreme Court.
Most reread
I think that has to be The Odyssey by Homer which is, as I read it, about how to create civilization in an often hostile universe. It seems to me a book that’s always relevant.
Biggest influence
Every book has some influence on me and I don’t think I could pick one book or even 100 that has more of an influence than others, but I’m constantly struck by individual moments which remain very vivid in my memory, lines like the last words in Middlemarch by George Eliot (“and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs”) or the last thing Blanche DuBois says in A Streetcar Named Desire by Tennessee Williams (“I have always depended on the kindness of strangers.”)
Marginalia? Pen or pencil?
Yes, marginalia, and underlinings too, in pencil or pen. I often use pens with four colors, each color for marking things for a different purpose. I think readers should be in a constant conversation with the writers of books, as they read and forever after.
E-readers?
I don’t really like them, but I do have one, it’s so wonderfully useful to multiply how many books you can have, and not only have but take with you to read on the bus.
Any books you just can’t finish?
I’m afraid so, a number of them. Here are two. Henry James: I know he’s a very great writer but I can never finish a Henry James novel, he meanders so endlessly around each point. Proust: I know he’s a great writer too but I just don’t care about what he tells me. Mea culpa, of course, but I’ve never been able to change it. Some writers just don’t speak to me.
Any books you just can’t get rid of?
Never tried. Not even the ones I can’t read.
Any glaring omissions?
Not really, but I’d like to mention something that amuses me to look back on, the first book I ever tried to read in English. I learned English at 11 when my family moved to Canada from Poland and after about four or five weeks I felt I had acquired enough of the language to read a book. So I took myself to the library and, not knowing what to ask for, picked the prettiest book on the shelves, a large, fat volume with a beautiful burgundy spine, and rushed home to start reading it. By chance, I opened not to the first page but one of the early ones, and these were the words that first greeted me:
By the shores of Gitche Gumee,
By the shining Big-Sea-Water,
Stood the wigwam of Nokomis,
Daughter of the Moon, Nokomis.
Needless to say, I had no idea what this was saying and spent the rest of the day in deep despair, certain I would never be able to learn this language. The book was, of course, Longfellow’s Hiawatha, which I did eventually read.
What’s by your bed?
Actually, nothing. I don’t read in bed. I’ve tried a few times but it was a no go. I’m too active and aggressive a reader to be able to do it. I have to have tools to read: a pen and a pencil, little sticky-notes to write on to be able to tape to the pages, notebooks to put down long comments and questions on, etc.
Favourite bookshop
My favorite bookstore, alas, is now in the past. It was called the National Bookstore and located in Greenwich Village in New York City. It was huge and packed to the rafters. It had every book I ever came to buy and, having begun my academic life as a classicist, some of those were old and rare. But Joe Resnick, who owned and ran it, not only had it, he knew it by sight. He could look up to the very top shelf, which was easily 20 feet high, point to a skinny orange book in the corner barely visible in the shadow of two fat volumes, and say, when I asked whether he had the Ernestus Diehl Edition of the Lyrica Graeca, “Sure, right there. Can you see it?” He himself had read half the books and always wanted to talk about them. Some of my best philosophic discussions were with Joe in his store. There will never be another like him. He died many years ago. I hope he’s in a very good place surrounded by lots of books.
Ten books you’d save from fire or flood
This is one of the hardest questions I’ve ever had to answer, but here goes…
William Shakespeare, a volume of his complete plays
Fragmente Der Vorsokratiker, edited by Hermann Diels. 3 vols. consisting of the complete collection of what is left of pre-Socratic philosophers like Heraclitus and Anaxagoras.
David Copperfield by Charles Dickens
Moby Dick by Herman Melville
Middlemarch by George Eliot
The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoevsky
The Phaedrus by Plato
The Odyssey (2 vols.) by Homer
Romola by George Eliot
The King James Bible
One book everyone should read
Can I recommend two? The Odyssey by Homer and Middlemarch by George Eliot. The Odyssey, as I said above, seems to me the book to read if we want to know how to create civilization in an often hostile universe; Middlemarch seems to me the book to help us figure out how to live there.
Felicia Bonaparte is Professor Emerita of English and Comparative Literature at the City University of New York.
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