A few months ago a floor-to-ceiling bookshelf was installed in the spare room of my cozy home in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. Putting up a bookshelf is usually neither here nor there, but this one marked an occasion worth celebrating. It was the first time, in a lifetime of globe-trotting, that all my books have had a home.
This is no small feat. An inveterate reader, I’ve left a trail of books in my wake as I’ve bounced around the globe: house to house in my native New Zealand, back and forth to the United States, with side trips everywhere in between, from bustling Hanoi, Vietnam, to cosmopolitan Brussels. At its absurd peak, I had books lying in six different places across three continents. My friends and family, who tended to house these errant books, generally handled the influx with a mix of good-natured exasperation and resignation.
The bulk of the collection has always been in New Zealand. In mid-2021, after a solid decade of navigating the labyrinthine American visa system, my wife and I moved to the United States. The shift was initially intended to be permanent, which meant all our possessions would come, too. Many of those possessions, unsurprisingly, were literary.
Getting everything out of the country happened in several parts. First, we crammed our Subaru Legacy station wagon to the brim and headed through the winding roads and wide plains of the South Island, my wife squeezed in the passenger seat as books and the occasional record slipped through to keep her company. For the final leg, from Auckland to Baton Rouge, the moving company packed our boxes. As a pair of burly movers carefully wrapped our possessions, my wife asked if they often sent such large shipments stateside. “Oh, yeah, sometimes,” one of them said. He paused. “Not usually this many books though, eh.”
After my books had been boxed up for three years during various moves and travel, finally getting to unpack them in Baton Rouge felt like meeting old friends. “Welcome to America,” I would say, holding a rediscovered treasure up to the light. Books can feel like companions, and gazing at them lined up together on my new shelf has brought back memories of when they were bought, what I was doing when I stumbled across them, and the adventures they’ve been dragged on. Sometimes it’s like gazing at an alternative narrative, in literary form, of the journey that brought me here.
Much of my new bookshelf is taken up by books about the United States or by its authors. This is partly the result of a lifelong fascination with the country, and partly an immigrant’s attempt to better understand his new home, with all of its quirks and messy contradictions. Toward the top is a battered copy of Jack Kerouac’s “On the Road,” a book that fed wide-eyed dreams of America as I hungrily devoured it on park benches and in cheap youth hostels throughout Australia.
On the second shelf is a similarly dog-eared oral biography of Hunter S. Thompson that I bought on my first stateside trip in 2009. My first few months in the country were spent on the road as a touring guitar player. Gazing at the book now brings back memories of reading it in a recreational vehicle between shows, the vast Western landscape of California and Colorado, Montana and Wyoming passing by as we drove.
Later on that same trip, I visited Louisiana for the first time and fell in love with its extroverted friendliness, its music, and its swampy, colorful culture. Pride of place on one shelf is T. Harry Williams’ masterful Huey Long biography, which I bought at a book sale as a university undergraduate in New Zealand, revisited after my first U.S. trip, finally started reading in a café in Laos, and finished on a Cambodian beach. Books sometimes have their own circuitous lives, too.
Scattered on the shelves are adventure books from my childhood, with the daring adventurer Biggles from the eponymous British series embarrassingly well represented. Filling the gaps is a mishmash of biographies, fiction of all sorts, and tomes on music, sports, and politics. This isn’t to say I’ve read them all. I’d love to dive into David McCullough’s 1,100-page Harry Truman biography, but what about Isaac Deutscher’s equally gargantuan “The Prophet”? Or anything by the many writers I have yet to read, like Thomas Pynchon, say, or Maya Angelou, or Richard Wright, or Doris Kearns Goodwin?
Readers know all about the pressure, a pressure that can feel almost accusatory, that can come with owning a stack of unread books. Plenty has been written about it, with the likes of legendary Italian writer Umberto Eco and Lebanese American scholar and essayist Nassim Nicholas Taleb weighing in. Writing about Dr. Eco’s famously large personal library in his book “The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable,” Dr. Taleb writes, “The more you know, the larger the rows of unread books.”
In many ways our move to the United States was a dream come true. Yet circumstances, and dreams, change. What was supposed to be permanent now appears temporary, with a move back to the antipodes all but certain at some point. One day the shelves will be emptied, the books placed back in their boxes, ready for another journey. Looking at the bookshelf serves as a reminder of what’s been and hints at what’s to come. For all of life’s impermanence and uncertainty, one thing is for sure. Wherever my wife and I go next, a good book will be along for the ride.
