City Lights: Parting with literature is not always such sweet sorrow

The other week, committing myself to a periodic desk cleaning, I went through the process of sifting through a stack of books and determining which ones to keep. In this case, the books belonged to a particular group: They were titles I had received through work, either as review copies or as gifts from sources. The growing pile necessitated the purge — I was going to run out of room soon — and so I rolled up my sleeves and set to work applying random criteria.

In some cases, quality won out. I declined to part with Candi Sary’s “Black Crow White Lie” and Jenny Lundquist’s “The Princess in the Opal Mask,” a pair of brilliant young-adult novels by local authors. Holding onto them meant not necessarily rereading them, since I rarely have time, but rather having them to lend to friends or own as keepsakes. The memoir by Terrence Roberts of the Little Rock Nine? It’s terrific, I interviewed him, and besides, it felt wrong to part with a noble book about civil rights. That one stayed too.

Others landed in the donation pile almost instantly: books that I had reviewed and didn’t care for, giveaways from publishers that I never got around to reading. After a few minutes, the desk looked pleasingly uncluttered, and the few books that remained had a glimmer of victory to them, like members of a sports team that had outlasted the others in the playoffs.

But in the greater scheme, any small cleaning of books — or CDs, DVDs or other artifacts — amounts to a first round of elimination. Years from now, when this desk is an increasingly distant memory, the books on it will no longer occupy a snug corner of a cubicle. They may instead fill a box in the garage labeled “Daily Pilot,” which may go on to share space with other boxes that encapsulate other periods of time.

Or, if they escape those dark confines, they will have to contend with the other mainstays inside the house. Part of that is a function of my personality; I’m not among those who like to live in cluttered space. I know some people whose collections of books, DVDs and the like turn entire rooms of their homes into libraries, but a handful of well-stocked shelves will do for me.

So that means plenty of competition when a new item joins the ranks. (Think of Woody’s wariness in “Toy Story” when Buzz Lightyear arrives in the bedroom — perhaps Pixar can make a film that anthropomorphizes books instead of toys.) As a critic, I constantly receive free goods in the mail, and though that sounds like a blessing, it runs up against the issues of time and space. Once in a while, a “Black Crow White Lie” will infiltrate the keeper stack. More often, the new arrivals pass on quickly.

When they pass on, where do they go? I sometimes think of books as having the same life trajectory as pets: birthed en masse, then delivered from store to store, shelf to shelf, until they wind up in the care of an owner who will let them grow old and withered. Some of my favorite volumes, which I bought used and held onto for decades, are now long out of print. When my memory goes someday, it may take a few of them with it.

That books, like writers, have a life cycle was underlined poignantly by the New Republic’s Cynthia Ozick in a recent essay. Presenting the reader with a flurry of 20th-century authors’ names, Ozick posed the rhetorical question of how many people are reading them at this hour, then delivered a grim prognosis: “It is safe to say that most are nowadays not much in demand either at your local library or on Amazon, and safer yet to surmise that many have little chance of outlasting even the first third of the 21st century; several have barely outlasted the 20th.”

Many of my books have, in a real sense, not survived the 20th century. In my own corner of the world, though, they have. In those private corners — and you have one too, of course, as does your neighbor and your neighbor’s neighbor — any questions of prestige or style disappear. The items may be new or used, bestsellers or small-press obscurities, shiny review copies or dog-eared rescues from the library bin. All that counts is that we respond to them in some way or another.

I don’t know if I can group all the volumes I have kept under the same umbrella, but if I had to, I would say that they are the ones that teach me the most about myself. Over a few decades of honing, that’s what a personal library amounts to: a sort of ramshackle self-portrait, comprised of likes, passions, memories and former selves that we never entirely shed.

Scanning those spines in my own collection, I see the markings of a person who has met a poet laureate and had a spiritual conversation with a star of “The Office.” I spot glimpses of the awkward teenager who eagerly honed his knowledge of film history, who can hum every Beatles song by heart. I recognize the man who has read Christopher Buckley’s poetry collection “Sky” multiple times and will not finish until he has absorbed all its multilayered brilliance.

Ten years from now, will some of the books I spared in the Daily Pilot stack occupy part of that space? Perhaps, or perhaps not. Either way, the decision will likely have nothing to do with the text or authors themselves. It will depend on the kind of person I am then — and what portrait I envision, however subconsciously, within the slender frames of those shelves.

MICHAEL MILLER is the features editor for Times Community News in Orange County. He can be reached at michael.miller@latimes.com or (714) 966-4617.