My Life Archived by Unintentional Bookmarks in My Books

Ulysses Annotated by Don Gifford and Robert J. Seidman

Ulysses by James Joyce

The Masterpiece by Emile Zola

The 120 Days of Sodom by Marquis de Sade

San Francisco Blues by Jack Kerouac

Until I Find You by John Irving

The Graveyard Book by Neil Gaiman

The Girl Who Played with Fire by Stieg Larsson

Swann’s Way by Marcel Proust

The Complete Works of Oscar Wilde

Nausea by Jean-Paul Sartre

A Reader’s Guide to James Joyce by William York Tindall

The Love Girl by Jill Neville

La-bas by J. K. Huysmans

Memnoch the Devil by Anne Rice

Christ the Lord by Anne Rice

Cry to Heaven by Anne Rice

The Catcher in the Rye by J. D. Salinger

Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone

Blood Canticle by Anne Rice

Voices in a Mask by Geoffrey Green

First Meetings in Ender’s Universe by Orson Scott Card

Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad

Your book collection is a reflection of yourself, your tastes, your intellectual pursuits, your career, and your circumstances. Your books themselves can be unintentional markers of where you were or what you were doing at certain points in your life. And the items you use as placeholders instead of bookmarks can reveal another level of who you were or are. I started a new project, going through all of my books and photographing what was left in each book. I went through all the books in my apartment but have yet to go through the books in storage at my folks’ house. I started because I found two safety pins in a book. I can’t recall the book (I wish it was something appropriate like Legs McNeil’s Please Kill Me but it wasn’t). Regardless, I began to wonder what else I would find in my books.

There were too many items to include in this single entry. I still have more books to add for future blog posts. It’s fun to see who I was and what I was doing when I was reading these books. It’s interesting that many of the placeholders indicate an active social life while I’m sitting at home or on the bus reading a book. I have spent so much time out and about because if I don’t get out of my room, I’ll read or worse, watch tv all night. These placeholders reveal so much more than I remember about myself. Forgotten people, phone numbers. But they also remind me of how long I’ve known some friends, and how many states we have known each other. Whether that be physical states and mental states. They also reiterate the people that I’ve been friends with for many, many years. The ones that have seen me through going to shows like the Toiletboys and going to clubs ten years ago. And the ones that accepted my being a book nerd in the midst of a raging social scene.