Part of My Library

I have always loved books. Perhaps, even, I have loved them too much. My two-bedroom apartment in West Los Angeles contains some six thousand books. Every room in my apartment has at least two bookcases, Although I am not now in a position to buy books the way I used to, I can’t get rid of them as fast as I bought them once upon a time.

Every walk I took ended in a bookstore, and rarely did I step back outside without buying at least one book. I am sure that, if I were not a book collector, I would have been able to buy a house. But then, I never really wanted to buy a house. I would be a terrible homeowner. I had doing yard work. I can’t fix anything. And I can’t imagine living the lifestyle of most homeowners. I am sure my neighbors would have ended up hating me.

On the other hand, books have saved my life. I was a sickly kid walking around for ten years with a pituitary tumor and severe frontal headaches. I was short for my age, pale, and absolutely zero when it came to sports. To compensate for my many deficits, I turned to books. In Cleveland, I took the 56A bus every week to the main branch of the Cleveland Public Library, stopping in on the way at Schroeder’s bookstore on Public Square, where I spent untold hours scanning the covers of the books on display.

My relatives didn’t think much of my being a bookworm. To my parents, books were innately messy unless they were all put away out of sight. Once, when my cousin Emil spotted me reading Mark Twain’s Tom Sawyer, he grabbed the volume from my hands and threw it on the floor. “That’s what I think of books!” he shouted.

But then I was the first in my family ever to graduate from college. And it was a prestigious Ivy League college to boot. And once I got a computer job in 1968, I was never unemployed for more than three months until the accounting firm where I was working in 2017 closed its doors.

No, in the end, I think I made all the right choices given the cards I was dealt. And I am happier for it.