The Five Books I'd Grab in Disaster

Books can be replaced. Stories cannot.

I wrote about keeping earlier this week. The wildfires in Los Angeles have me thinking more about the intangible value of things. What is worth keeping? What truly matters?

I have spent several days going through my possessions. I’ve laid my hands on keepsakes and treasures, I’ve looked through old photos and journals to remember experiences, people, places that have been important in my life. The process has been rich with nostalgia, and a stark reminder that nothing remains forever.

I have been safe from the recent fires. My family in Los Angeles has been spared, too. The only devastation I’ve suffered is the heartbreak of seeing images of my hometown in flames, neighborhoods reduced to rubble, people in disbelief and guttural grief.

I asked my children at dinner last night what they’d grab if confronted with this kind of danger. Both teenagers said “their phones,” though I could not argue with their practicality. So much of our lives are contained on our phones.

While I was thinking of my answer, my son rolled his eyes. “You’d save your books.”

I’d miss my books, yes, but they are replaceable things. Still, I went to my bookshelf later to consider which of them I would save if given the time and opportunity.

• Gift from the Sea by Anne Morrow Lindbergh.

Certainly, the book itself can be repurchased. But this copy was a gift from my late mother, inscribed in her signature Catholic-school script. Between the pages are dried leaves she inserted from her last trip to Yosemite, one of my favorite places. Her words and those leaves could never be be replaced.

• Tenth of December, by George Saunders

  

  Though I could replace the book, I couldn’t replace the inscription. For my forty-fifth birthday, my husband discreetly pulled this from my shelf (after months of listening to me talk only about George Saunders and his Substack Story Club), sent it to George with a note begging (I’m guessing) him to sign it. This is what I got back:

  

  Not just his signature, but words and illustrations! It’s an absolute treasure.

• My mother’s cookbook

  

  She hand wrote all my favorite recipes, many of which read like this:

  “Fruit Salad”

  Stir together a can of mandarin oranges in heavy syrup and a can of pineapple chunks in heavy syrup. Sprinkle with mini marshmallows and sweetened shredded coconut.

  There are no entries under the “Vegetables” tab, but all my favorite desserts are included.

• Sing Unburied Sing by Jesmyn Ward

  

  You can’t tell from the cover, but this is the most annotated, dog-eared, flagged and marked-up book in my collection. I refer to it every time I write. Jesmyn Ward’s sentences are like bodily blows, so rich in context, so beautifully and perfectly written. This is a model of a novel. But even if my notes were lost to disaster or to time, I’d re-read this book again and again (and probably find even more to love).

• Celeste, by me…

  

  This is the first novel I ever wrote. It is certainly a piece of work…

  When I finished it, I printed two copies, one to put on my shelf as a reminder of the effort. The second I sent to my dad, simply so he could say “my daughter wrote a novel.”

  In its current state, it will never be read by anyone else. It needs a thorough editorial scrubbing and professional review. I keep telling myself I’ll get to it once I finish drafting my current novel because I am terrified of the revision process. I don’t know quite how to attack it, where to begin, how it will feel. I’m not sure I have the fortitude to hear that it isn’t good, that I’m not good.

  I finished it more than two years ago and I think my skills have improved since then, which means I can only make it better.

  Knowing it made this list makes me sure it’s worth saving. And maybe that’s reason enough to trust myself to revise it.

Are there books in your collection you’d hate to lose? What special meaning do they hold for you?

Pico Iyer’s reflection on the loss of his home to a forest fire in 1990 has resonated with me as I’ve been contemplating loss and keeping. “Home is not where you happen to live, so much as what lives inside you” he said. “I still have my words, the poems I’d learned from, my inner savings account.” What we contain is what truly matters.