By Anirvan Chatterjee
Special to AsianWeek
A friend and I walk into the home of an acquaintance. As my friend jumps into conversation with our host, I smile, nod, and eventually wander away. The place is tastefully decorated. Bold colors, nice furniture. I see a set of bulging bookshelves, and stroll over to take a look. It’s good stuff.
The books are neatly segregated by category. Ron Takaki, Amy Tan and Bharati Mukherjee sit side by side on one shelf; Junot Díaz and Carlos Muñoz nestle together below, as Gabriel Garcia Marquez watches from the side. I look further down and see Michel Foucault, The Penguin Book of International Gay Writing and The HIV Drug Book. I look over to the next bookshelf and see histories of the Vietnam War and of the Philippines. There’s a set of fat books underneath: Public Finance in Theory and Practice, and Economic Analysis of Environmental Policy and Regulation.
I find myself imagining an identity for this man I don’t yet know, who has a passion for ethnic studies, queer issues and Asian Pacific American history. Perhaps he has an MBA or has taken some finance-related courses because of his day job. As the evening progresses, I get a chance to talk to my host. He turns out to be not very different from what I had imagined; the organization of his bookshelf had easily predicted his interests and priorities.
We live in a world where we’re constantly flooded with unstructured information. Now, more than ever, people spend time cataloging their lives, bringing order to the chaos — to-do lists, Internet bookmarks, top ten lists, day planners, MP3 playlists. Some people sort and organize their clothes by season or color. I’m not one of them. My closet is a big mess of jeans, sweaters, old T-shirts, suits — but there’s nothing chaotic about my bookshelves.
As my shelves have gotten fuller, I’ve come up with some categories that work well for me: general fiction, science fiction, South Asian diasporic literature. Comics, miscellaneous nonfiction, books about technology, books about music, books about books. Politics and history, as well as Asian/APA nonfiction (a category arbitrarily subdivided into critical and non-critical writing; a flock of Penguins on one side, university press titles on the other). Bengali books.
Selecting categories can be a tricky process. Although they’re both contemporary Asian British novelists, I choose to place Salman Rushdie and Kazuo Ishiguro on different shelves (South Asian diasporic literature and general fiction, respectively). Similarly, although both categories apply, I choose to call myself a hyphenated American rather than a plain ol’ American. Our lives as APAs make us very aware of the power of labels and categories. Japanese, or East Asian? Korean Baptist, or Christian? APA, or person of color? Given the multiplicity of options, the choices we have to make aren’t always easy.
Why use categories? Because they makes things easier. I could mix my science fiction in with the rest of my books, but that would mean more work on my part when I just want to read some science fiction.
Categories can be entirely personal. I have a friend who splits up her books between contemporary poetry, books by and about Virginia Woolf, and everything else; when she’s in a Virginia Woolf mood, she doesn’t want to have to rummage through piles of unrelated titles. My acquaintance with the bulging bookshelves could have chosen to categorize his books differently. Gabriel Garcia Marquez and The Penguin Book of International Gay Writing might have fit into a category on international writers. Alternatively, he could have showcased an interest in science and public policy by putting books like The HIV Drug Book and Economic Analysis of Environmental Policy and Regulation together. The choices he made reflected what he considered to be useful and important.
Books, by virtue of being physical objects, can only be in one place at a time. Ron Takaki’s books can’t be on both the APA and general history shelves at the same time. Thankfully, we’re not so limited in how we can place ourselves. I’m a male 20-something progressive Bengali South Asian American dot-commer bibliophile from the Bay Area (phew!). I’m glad I don’t have to pick out a single shelf to file myself under.
Anirvan Chatterjee is the founder of BookFinder.com, an online search service for new, used and out of print books. He can be reached at anirvan@bookfinder.com.
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