Packing My Library - by Patrick Nathan
patricknathan.substack.com · 2,273 words · saved by 1 readers
What I want from my shelves, as I pack them up, is criticism. Here are a few of my favorites.
I am packing my library. Yes, I am. But unlike Benjamin — a “genuine collector” whose passion “borders on the chaos of memories,” as his famous essay has it — my books form what Elizabeth Hardwick liked to call a “working library”: a private system of easily retrievable information, notes, impressions, and experiences. Arranged by author, each book is its own file folder: articles from 2015 and 2016, as we careened toward the presidential election, clipped and folded into Arendt’s Origins of Totalitarianism; an editor’s note from Hanya Yanagihara about curating a magazine hidden away in…
related reading
- Some ways of looking at booksphilocrumbs.substack.com
- Bookshelf · Patrick Collisonpatrickcollison.com
- Books I've been readingdanwang.co
- A list of books and essays that I lovehenrikkarlsson.xyz
- Essay: The digital death of collectingkylechayka.substack.com
- bookbear express | Ava | Substackavabear.xyz
- Against lists of bookssamkriss.substack.com
- Best Essays of All Time – Ranked | Make Lists, Not Warbeckchris.com
- 100 Best Books of the 21st Century - The New York Timesnytimes.com
- the life you were meant to livepersonalcanon.com
- Against lists of bookssamkriss.substack.com
- A Harvard undergraduate assesses his unfinished worksharvardmagazine.com