History Lesson

For the past five years, we housed a library in our front room. Upon the death of my husband's brother, Paul, his books needed a home. My husband thought we would have some use for Paul's books and brought them to our house and subsequently, filled every available wall space in our living room with books.

I love books. I love history books. But I love the human part of history, the everyday life, the simple and mundane. Paul's books are political and historical and relate to war and upheaval and the ugly side of history. Yes yes, World War II and the psyche of Hitler is important. But not to me. I don't care about Stalin or the making of the atomic bomb. I don't want to read about living in a prisoner of war camp during the Vietnam war. I could care less about the PT boats that shot at the Japanese. And so, apparently, could everyone else in my family.

After five years of seeing these books crowd my living room, fill with dust, lay fallow, be ignored and never getting read, my husband as agreed to give them away. He has agreed that they are doing no one any good by rotting in our living room. Paul would have wanted them read, and enjoyed by someone. These books are great reference materials for someone doing research about war and politics.

For the past three weeks, we have been cataloging the books with Author, Title, Dewey Decimal code and ISBN. We have filled thirteen boxes with approximately 600 books. I would guess we are about forty percent done. We are hoping a college might find some use for them.

While I have been gleeful at every book that goes into a box, it's been difficult for my husband. These books represent his brother's legacy. Paul never finished his doctoral dissertation, but he loved history and political science enough to create his library.

So as I type the names of books into an Excel spreadsheet, I have been thinking how narrow my knowledge of history has been. I really have no interest in the political side of a country. I usually skim passages in a novel that describe bills in The House of Lords or discussions in The House of Commons. I'm not about to read all those books (now) neatly packed away in boxes, but maybe I will pay closer attention to some of the poliitcal details within a novel.