Written on the Shelf: The Writer as Reader
What a bookshelf reveals about a writer’s story
M y bookshelf is tall and stately, wood stained the colour of honey, lending warmth and personality to my living-room. The old-fashioned angular cornices at the top are reminiscent of the Victorian era. Knowing my life-long love for books, my father gave it to me one Christmas many years ago.
Five shelves high, this means I have to stretch a little to reach the top shelf, and I like that feeling — of reaching for a treasured book. It makes me think of the feeling of yearning I get when I’m not reading; a yearning to sink in to the pages of a book and lose myself in story, or the mental reach for the right word that one makes as a writer.
For the writer, even when reading for pleasure, what we absorb provides stimulation and ideas that contribute, consciously and unconsciously, to our own work. The books and ideas we’ve engaged with over a lifetime contribute to the writer we are today, and will be tomorrow.
Language and ideas, once encountered, live inside you, and can effect changes, both subtle and catalytic.
Perhaps that’s why the bookshelf is an important touchstone for many a writer — both its solid physical version in our homes, and its mental version — the spines on the shelves of the mind, the names of beloved books and authors inscribed there. For some, the ordering of books and subjects on their bookshelf is neat and precise, for others ramshackle and random.
Regardless, books on a bookshelf can be read like a map of the writer’s passions, values and interests; ideas that sift and shift through different phases of an intellectual life.
A place for classic literature & self-development
I keep my classics on the top shelf, just as a bartender will keep his top-notch spirits and liqueurs, gleaming and beckoning, on the uppermost shelf. There, Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment sits next to Dante’s Divine Comedy, D. H. Lawrence’s Sons and Lovers and Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter. Emily Bronte’s Jane Eyre leans, shivering a little, against Poe’s Tales of Mystery and Imagination. Found in a second-hand bookstore, there’s a 1900 edition of Tennyson’s poems. This shelf is bolstered by Shakespeare’s Collected Works at one end and a weighty volume of Oscar Wilde’s prolific and genre-spanning writing at the other.
A voracious reader from a very young age, this shelf reflects my love of reading widely and deeply, and my valuing of reading works that challenge and stretch the intellect and imagination.
The books and ideas we’ve engaged with over a lifetime contribute to the writer we are today, and will be tomorrow.
The second shelf holds, to the left, a curated version of what used to occupy two entire shelves. These books reflect my Arts degree major and former vocation as a theatre director and actor: my plays, books on playwrights, and theatre and performance theory.
Reading and studying these texts during my adolescence and beyond, studying literature at University and hurling myself headlong into several semesters of Shakespeare and Ancient Greek Theatre (text and performance) in my theatre degree gave me a deep appreciation for the almost-limitless fecundity of language.
As importantly, it cultivated an absence of fear of language’s complexity. Wrestling with Grecian choric text, conquering the vocal delivery of iambic pentameters in Shakespeare’s work, finding contemporary sense in obscure medieval words, and unravelling complex metaphors revealed depth, beauty and universal truths in works conceived many centuries ago. These interactions with language absolved me of any hesitancy in seeking out any author I felt curious about, and opened me to the power and potency of the written word.
The ideas we consume contribute to our growth or our atrophy. Language and ideas, once encountered, live inside you, and can effect changes, both subtle and catalytic.
Words endure. And the feelings they conjure up in the body endure too, leaving traces, imprints in the cells, the memory. As Roland Barthes, renowned French literary theorist and philosopher wrote in his essay collection The Pleasure of the Text:
I am interested in language because it wounds or seduces me.
The centre of this shelf houses key feminist texts such as Germaine Greer’s The Female Eunuch, reflecting my interest in gender studies. On the right side sit many of my favourite books on philosophy, psychology, and spirituality, including Barthes A Lover’s Discourse: Fragments and the Dalai Lama’s The Art of Happiness, reminding me of my dip into Buddhism and many late-night conversations with my then-boyfriend.
If I look at my second shelf, it reflects mainly my twenties and early thirties; a period of individuation, of deepening my passions and defining my values.
Finding my voice through women’s writing
My third shelf holds more recent literary touchstones; books that have coaxed me away from the role of avid reader to being a writer. On this shelf, women authors take centre-stage: Angela Carter’s The Bloody Chamber leans against Nin’s Delta of Venus. Several of Jeanette Winterson’s works converse with Atwood’s chillingly feminist work of speculative fiction The Handmaid’s Tale.
There are women’s short story and poetry anthologies, feminist essay collections, and female contemporary novelists, such as German author Christa Wolf’s Medea, a vivid feminist re-imagining of Medea’s life and the events that would drive a woman to murder her children.
Many of these works resonate with my appreciation for work that combines both vivid story-telling and cultural critique through a feminist lens; or for sensual narratives that explore feminine desire honestly and intelligently. It reflects my increasing interest in reading that describes a feminine experience of the world, one that often places experiences felt through and mediated by the body as a central focus.
In her essay entitled “Writing as Reading”, literary theorist Susan Sontag captures my thoughts on the relationship between what one reads and how one writes:
Reading usually precedes writing. And the impulse to write is almost always fired by reading.
Writing has helped me embrace the totality in supposed contradictions between the light and dark experiences of my life, my body, my sexuality. Certain books, such as Adrienne Rich’s 1979 incisive essay collection On Lies, Secrets and Silence gave me the courage to carve out narratives that explore my experiences of sexual trauma. Writing as a Way of Healing by Louise DeSalvo gave me a sane and self-nurturing approach to writing difficult, personal experiences of trauma and loss.
Discovering Anais Nin’s Delta of Venus in my mid-twenties gave me the spark to write about desire and sexuality, and, almost a decade later, re-discovering Jeanette Winterson’s searing prose gave me the permission. Something about Winterson’s work resonated with the language burning away inside me, threatening a slow smouldering consumption of my journal pages if I didn’t give my ideas more space and light. From the same essay, Sontag observes that our writing too, is part of our reading; that “to write is to practice, with particular attentiveness, the art of reading.”
My obsession with writing craft and creative process in all art forms reveals itself here by my collection of books on these themes. Ray Bradbury’s Zen in the Art of Writing exchanges ideas with Ursula Le Guin’s Steering the Craft — and I probably own too many of Julia Cameron’s creative recovery books. (Her best-selling book The Artist’s Way helped me reclaim my artistic direction when I was questioning everything). As Sontag muses:
… writing is finally, a series of permissions you give yourself to be expressive in certain ways.
This shelf also houses a modest, but still-growing collection of poetry, short story anthologies and literary journals in which my own work has been published: I like to keep them close to the books and authors that were catalysts for my decision to become a writer.
Books as doorways to our former selves
Guarded by a few childhood trinkets and a framed photo of a little me feeding a kangaroo, I keep the stories that sustained and delighted me in childhood on this shelf: some which I’ve also re-read as a teenager and an adult. These books I could never let go of because they’re in some way responsible for fostering my life-long love of reading.
A lovely red-leather bound edition of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll whispers with George McDonald’s A Little Princess and At the Back of the North Wind. There’s a tall illustrated book of fairy tales by Hans Christian Anderson I’ve had since I was about six years old, and my entire original collection of C.S Lewis’ Narnia books, read countless times. As a Narnia-obsessed child, I was forever exploring the back of wardrobes in the hope I too would stumble into a magical wintry forest, to be greeted by a friendly talking faun.
Like a set of Russian dolls, the other parts of me at different ages are still nestled inside me, and re-visiting stories that have companioned me through my life-journey is one powerful way of accessing these other selves. Inevitably, when we return to a book read earlier in life, we notice changes of perspective in how and what we see in a story.
Like sign-posts, or scars, they mark the places of our own growth or change. Or as author Jeanette Winterson observes in The World and Other Places:
When we read something for the first time, that is the moment at which it is written. When we read something again, our own past and present collide.
Bottom shelf: An eclectic bargain basement
Is your bottom shelf like this? Here lives a mostly random collection of overflow recipe books from my kitchen, a few inherited books off my parent’s bookshelf, (including a wonderful almanac entitled The World’s Last Mysteries), books on natural therapies, Ancient Rome and a couple of photo albums.
Somehow, several of my science fiction favourites have ended up here including War of the Worlds, and Orwell’s 1984. Honourable mention must be made of my worn collection of paperbacks by my literary grandfather and tale-teller extraordinaire, Ray Bradbury.
Your Bookshelf: A Map of your Writing Journey
How does your bookshelf map the “country of you” — your literary loves and aspirations? In Barthes’ words, what has wounded or seduced you?
Bringing awareness to our influences can help us develop our writerly style and voice. Or as Sontag articulates:
Reading, the love of reading, is what makes you dream of becoming a writer. And long after you’ve become a writer, reading books others write — and rereading the beloved books of the past — constitutes an irresistible distraction from writing. Distraction. Consolation. Torment. And yes, inspiration.
Follow Melissa Coffey for thoughtful essays and provocative poetry & fiction. Not a Medium member? Join with my referral link for just $5 a month to access all my stories & so much more. Find your voice & others you’ll want to hear.
