A Different Drummer: On being a man by the books

I’m not hard to figure out. As a person, I’m no mystery. I pretty much wear my life on my sleeve in this column. I share facets of my life others may never think to share, or would shudder to share. I have only a few private parts.
Some people say, as they say, that you can tell a lot about a person by perusing their bookshelf. The books people read, or don’t read, say a lot about them, they say. Let’s find out. Allow me to review my own book collection and speak to a few titles. Perhaps in the end we shall reach a conclusion.
My bookshelf has undertaken a significant consolidation. While teaching I had wall-to-wall adjustable homemade bookshelves on ceiling to floor racks. Books were sorted by size and sideways, stuffed so tight I couldn’t see the back wall. My den looked like a branch of the WTF Library. A profiler would walk away labeling me as a messy eclectic.
When I retired I became a minimalist. I emptied my den to the floor boards and bare walls. Today I have a small Adobe Second Chance Thrift Shop bookshelf tucked into my den closet. It’s a sparse five shelves, and I brought back from the garage only my absolute favorite books.
Thus, a run through should be quick and perhaps reveal some sort of personality in there.
For size over significance, on my top shelf I have 14 books on blackjack and poker. I’m not a big gambler, but card flow and probability has fascinated me since my 20s. I once taught card counting through the Benicia Park Service. I learned Texas Holdem and have $155 million in fake money in my online Zynga account. Owning a cabin six miles from the Tahoe casinos has played no small part in acquiring this bundle of books.
On the next shelf are the remains of my massive fiction collection. This was the hardest category to trim. A 1931 copy of “Moby Dick” by Herman Melville sits center. This book altered my understanding of life, the universe, and everything, more than Douglass Adams, whose books sit nearby. The instant I understood Moby Dick, I flipped, and I never came back. ‘Twas a heavy connection at my primary junction. Herman dropped a big one on me.
A ragtag yet complete Vonnegut collection is there because “Slaughterhouse Five” was my first college novel as a freshman, and it blew my mind. Next is “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest” by Ken Kesey because it was my second college novel, and it also blew my mind.
It wasn’t until I became a junior at Penn State that I discovered “Moby Dick.” The other books had prepared me. “Moby Dick” simultaneously triggered every neuron in my mind and my spine to fire at once. I was tingulated (my word). That whale awakened me. As a senior I studied Oriental philosophy and I could easily dig it because I’d been there.
Classic literature is my go to genre. I prefer authors who’ve been dead a long time. They have a knowledgeable mystique for me. I don’t have many living authors, except, of course, for Christopher Moore. I have all his books and await his next eagerly. He’s crazy funny.
Prominent on the shelf is Dante Alighieri’s “The Divine Comedy,” plus my teaching copy of “Inferno,” dog-earred, tattered, faded, and heavily annotated by me over 30 years. The book teaches perspective on good and evil.
I have read most of Hermann Hesse. He weaves western stories with eastern philosophy. That seems fitting. I began with “Siddhartha” in a Zen Buddhism class.
“The Iceman Cometh” and “The Hairy Ape” by Eugene O’Neill survive because they helped me understand my rural cultural upbringing. The Iceman shatters dreams in his efforts to bring reality to his back-home friends. The ape came proudly from the wrong side of the tracks, and died tragically. Next to O’Neill, and for similar reasons, is an old copy of “The Stranger” by Albert Camus.
I kept Leo Tolstoy’s short stories. Leo goes deep. The profound understanding of human nature that comes from knowing his characters, for me, has had a lifelong impact. Alas, I’ve yet to complete a Tolstoy novel. I like to joke that “I’ve been reading ‘Anna Karenina’ for 43 years.”
Next is “Crime and Punishment” and my favorite, “Notes from Underground,” by Fyodor Dostoyevsky. I’ve never identified so much with a novel and character in my life. Once in the 1980s I gave a copy of “Underground” to a student who I thought needed it. A week later he handed me a note: “Damn you, Mr. Gibbs. I wanted to write this book.”
Philosophy sits on the next shelf. Six Alan Watts titles sit up front. Al’s got a way of describing life’s essence that I can relate to, and he lived in Sausalito until he died in1973; his lectures are all over YouTube. As Lord Buckley would say, “When he laid it, wham, it stayed there.”
Across the bottom, I keep the many books of Michael Pollen and Joel Salatin, crusaders for good healthy food, and the books of Jon Krakauer, crusader in general. I own various exposés on corruption, various. I also own a copy of The Complete Works of the Marquis de Sade and most of the books in the “Truly Tasteless Jokes” series.
Last are a few magazines from my subscriptions: Rolling Stone, Mother Jones, Utne Reader and Beer Advocate. I’m in there somewhere.