Christmas Letter 2024: The Books I Keep
My favorite day of the year is approaching: December 26. That’s the day I read a novel. On December 26, I wake up in the morning, percolate my first cup of coffee, open a book to page one, and begin to read. I read all day. I start on the patio in the weak December sun, and then move inside to lounge on the couch. I may or may not shower. I do not count the cups of coffee I consume. I read an entire book in a single day. It’s the best day of the year.
I am not, for the most part, a keeper of books. I have a single six-shelf bookcase in my bedroom which is not entirely full.
The books I keep include an unmatched set of the entire Harry Potter series, each volume in a different stage of beloved wear. I have kept that brilliant immigration novel, which I stole from my brother’s house, written by a former Rose of Tralee. New to the bookshelf are the three Shakespeare plays I studied in Rome this summer. I’ll hold on to those for a while, since they still exude the smell of the life water of Fontana della Barcaccia. I have kept quite a few books from my undergrad days, which I keep for sentimental reasons. They preserve the penciled marginalia, almost illegible after 35 years, of my wistfully romantic young adulthood. (Ah, the undergrad days, when books were liquid light.) Now that I’m searching over the book spines, I see I have some pop culture books that I suppose I can give away: the last Hunger Games novel and something about a girl on a train, or a girl missing a train, or a girl watching her life zoom by on a train. Oh, and here’s that unabridged tome of Les Misérables which I am determined to finish someday. My bookmark says I left off on page 516. I have a copy of Cyrano de Bergerac that I’ve never opened. A friend lent that to me a very long time ago; I really should return it. And this one is precious: the international espionage murder mystery I gifted to my Dad on his last Christmas.
One shelf contains a collection of venerated books: those signed by the author. I cherish a 50th anniversary edition of To Kill a Mockingbird signed by Harper Lee. I have two memoirs signed by Elie Wiesel. The shelf also boasts a self-published memoir written by friend, a Holocaust survivor, who lives in an adjacent city. These stand next to my cousin’s two novels, a non-fiction WWII history penned by my daughter’s high school track coach, a book of beautiful meditations compiled by our former nanny, and, most recently, a children’s book published by a student of mine. His book stands on the same shelf as Harper Lee’s.
So, I suppose I am a keeper of some books. Each book I keep is an homage to the author or to the gifter or to the gifted.
Because I have a rule that I may only keep as many books as my bookcase can hold, I purge regularly. In my lifetime, hundreds of books have moved through my hands. Whether I stack them reverently into brown bags as library donations or hand them individually to worthy recipients, they get lost to the world, like travelling nomads or gypsies on the Silk Road of our shared human experience.
Invariably, a few books in the purge pile cause me to pause in discernment. Passing along these books is akin to losing these authors’ very ethos: their perfectly wrought sentences, the fictional souls into which they breathed life, the creative montages over which they anguished and languished. These divinely inspired, candle-lit illuminations of scribbled genius… I cradle these endearingly in my two palms, and then I let them go.
(Author’s note: I paused here, and I cradled my empty palms before me, imagining all the books that have nestled in them. I stared for a moment, then a moment longer, and then I caught my breath with the image of what was no longer there. Their radiant infant smell. Their swaddled compactness. The delicacy of the transparent skin over their sleeping eyelids. The unbearable nearness of them.)
These divinely bestowed, star-lit brilliances of chaotic genius ... I once cradled these three endearingly in my two palms, and now, I am letting them go.
They are writing the stories of their lives. In one story, a university-degreed young man steps with muddy boots and a gentlemen’s heart into the world of the daily grind, only to be stopped short by a glint of glass under the soil. In another story, a young woman of the cusp of her own university graduation begins her internship at The Boston Globe, wide-eyed and ready to show the world her worth. And in a third story, a young person steadies himself before he leaps from the dry plateau of default expectations to a verdant valley of his own creative panache.
(Author’s note: I paused here and wondered, on Christmas Eve: What was it like for her? To have cradled Him so unbearably near? To have smelled the life water beneath His unblemished skin? All the while knowing her whole purpose was to not keep Him, to let Him go?)
Perhaps I am indeed a keeper of books. Or perhaps I am a sacrist, a keeper of sacred objects, of all the books that are not mine to write.
This year, instead of wishing you a Merry Christmas,
I wish you a joyous day after Christmas.
On December 26, may you find yourself enamored with a divinely written story:
your children’s, stranger’s, a genius’s, your own.
May you cradle these preciously in the palms of your hands.
And may your bookshelf overflow with all that you have let go.
Merry Christmas 2024 from the McKeagneys
