The Need For the Book Embargo

Two weeks before my thirtieth birthday I sent out an email to my loved ones. I was only beginning to recover from the traumatic process of collecting my possessions, spread out in five apartments in four countries, into a sixth apartment in a fifth country – my new home where I was to make a life with the love of my life. He knew, of course, that I am a bibliophile with a literature, but I suspect he had not entirely understood what that ultimately entails. At the time of the email our life together was starting to seem practically impossible: much as I love him, I was not entirely certain there was space for him in our apartment. My boyfriend is very tall.

I had made a radical cull of my book collection in Sweden, given boxes of books to charities in Finland, and sold a back-breaking load of text books back to Blackwell's in Oxford, from which I scored a fortune in cash (nowhere close to the cost of mailing the remainder to Denmark). Now I was sitting in Århus with books for several lifetimes, chuffed-looking postmen delivering additional boxes daily, a desperate dearth of shelf space and an overwhelming sense of guilt. Guilt about the money I'd spent on these books, and about all the books I'd been given as gifts and had hardly looked at, ecological guilt, and something more profound relating to my life-style choices during the past fifteen years, which made me feel equally awful about the time I'd spent reading and the time I'd spent doing anything else. This is when I thought up the embargo.

I asked my boyfriend for his views, and he agreed to it on two conditions: that he would still be allowed to buy books for himself, and that he would still be allowed to give me books as gifts. Secretly relieved, since I saw in this a convenient loophole, I immediately agreed. Then I made up some rules, and emailed my family an apologetic email. Everyone I love also loves books, and I was worried that they would not understand how suffocated I was suddenly feeling. I guess I worried that they'd somehow take it personally. They all have great taste in books. I wrote to them that this, exactly, was the POINT – that I wanted a chance to read the books they'd already given me.

I'd already gotten rid of every book, even the good ones, that I felt fairly certain I would never want to read again. The goal of the embargo would be to continue this process, and gain some kind of equilibrium, in which the total amount of books in the apartment would in the future be lower rather than higher.

Equilibrium: I only realized it as I wrote the word just now, but although libra means balance, librarius means relating to books. This connection is what had become skewed in my life.