The Precarious Shelf

My stack of books grows with each new book challenge I enter, with every book review that reaches my mailbox, with the suggestions of newspaper reviewers, bloggers, and friends. Then there are the books to read for my book club. I keep a notebook with me to write down the books I want to read. Sometimes I defer even looking at the Wall Street Journalthe day my favorite "book" reviewer lists some of her favorites. Often she reaches backwards to other decades to resurrect the name of someone I either don't know or always wanted to read.

I entered the Eastern European Challenge because I wanted to expand my reading to include some newly translated books; however, I forgot that many libraries are painfully remiss in including translations save for the tried and true writers. What's a girl to do, but find some used books. One package arrived yesterday with two books—one for the meager price of $1.25. The condition was excellent. In fact the book's binding appeared in pristine shape. The original price—$12.95. These books are often not best sellers, in fact they may not move off the shelf and when they move it may be with a bargain sticker and onto a cart with other books also relegated to "other" status.

As a country we're woefully behind other countries when it comes to encouraging translations of books from other countries and cultures. Is it that we don't think that we can learn from these "other" writers? Yet our writers revel in the thought of being translated into dozens of languages and media people love to report that "his books have been translated into sixteen different languages."

Go to any bookstore and there are a number of Scandinavian mystery writers with their newest books translated into English. The writers in those countries discovered a lode of gold—snowy landscapes and mysteries. Writers with names that are difficult to roll around my tongue introduce audiences to bleak scenarios and gothic settings. Detectives mired in introspective moods set out to find killers who often disappear into wilderness settings where darkness is a way of life. In last year's Scandinavian challenge I sought writers who didn't pen mysteries and discovered Per Petterson. Isn't it a sheer joy to find a writer who you instantly enjoy and realize that there's a shelf of books to explore?

I added the two new books to a stack on one shelf. After the additions the stack leaned perilously to one side. What book should I remove? Do I read a book for each challenge , four in all, in a rotating order? But when I went to the library last week I found a memoir written by a woman who, although born in Utah and descended from a lineage that stretched back to Mormon ancestors who traveled in wagons that made it through the famous Hole-in-the-Wall, couldn't quite fit into the community she chose in San Juan county, Utah. The book is part memoir, part history—both family and Mormon—and part about being the outsider.

Before I even allowed myself to think about her relationship with her boyfriend, with the locals, or with herself I recalled how much I enjoyed Terry Tempest Williams books—another writer from Utah. In a notebook I keep of passages from books, I find this from her book Red.

Can we learn to speak the language of red?

The relationship between language and landscape is a marriage of sound and form, an oral geography, a sensual topography, what draws us to a place and keeps us there. Where we live is the center of how we speak.

From the same book I copied these words:

Wilderness is not a belief. It is a place.
And in Utah, we know these places by name.

What follows is a litany of names—like a biblical roll call.

With the book on my lap I wandered back to the bookstore in Moab, Utah —Back of Beyond Books . It was there I first discovered some of the wonderful writing of those writers who lived in and among the wilderness areas of Utah. Many of the lesser known writers remain west of the Mississippi. Their books don't seem to migrate eastward— at least not to local bookstores or small libraries. It was in another small store in Torrey, Utah that I found one of my cherished books. An artist and a poet collaborated to create a small gem about the desert.

That's the way with reading, one book propels me off in another direction—maybe a small tangent—and suddenly another book is added to the stack of owned books and library books.

Suddenly the orange and red canyons lured me to my sketch book and I wanted to replicate the canyons I walked amidst in Utah. I recall one in Capital Reef National Park where, according to the stories, Butch Cassidy evaded the law by disappearing into the recesses of the canyon. Today if you hike the Frying Pan Trail you hike right past Cassidy Arch .Now instead of the law looking for Cassidy the rangers remind hikers that the canyon is prone to flash floods --" be aware of the weather and the sky and carry enough water."

I remove one book from the stack before it topples— The End of a Family Story by the Hungarian writer Peter Nadas. Several weeks ago I read an article he wrote for a Hungarian magazine:

I was born in the Budapest Jewish Hospital on the day when the entire Jewish population of the recently occupied Polish town of Mozicz was herded into a nearby stone quarry. On that Wednesday morning, several thousand people were stripped naked and shot. Every last one of them. It happened on 14 October 1942.

October 14 th is also my birthday, but I was born in the Bronx on a warm fall day. My father tells me that it was sunny that day.

The stack appears stabilized, for the moment, until I add more books— which is inevitable.