The book had its own volition and would force me to reckon with it, just like history.
– Louise Erdrich, The Sentence
Within this first thematic section of Shelf Life, the class explored what it means for a book to have its own agency, life, and fate – as well as how the importance of site, such as the bookstore or library, fits into this approach to the book.
Shelf Life begins with Louise Erdrich’s The Sentence which follows the protagonist Tookie as a book that has the ability to kill, and the ghost of the person it killed haunts her. From paper scented perfume, or the paper lined bookstore confessional, to Tookie’s attempt in prison to suffocate herself with paper, and the ghost which haunts the bookstore but cannot “heft a book, get the feel of it, weigh it in her hands before opening it to look at the words,” The Sentence is suffused with the materiality of books (51). Here, Shelf Life begins the course discussion with prose filled with affectionate and detailed passages on books and bookstores – and a narrative in which a book plays a central agent for enacting change on those it comes into contact with.
At the end of The Sentence, Erdrich complies together a list of book recommendations titled, “Totally Biased List of Tookie’s Favorite Books,” including recommendations for “Short Perfect Novels,” “Books for Banned Love,” “Indigenous Lives,” “Sublime Books,” and “Tookie’s Pandemic Reading” (262-266). This appendix served as a source of inspiration for one of the first assignments for the students. The students were tasked with picking a book on that list and finding it within one of the university libraries. Once they found this book, they would purposefully try to lose themselves within the stacks – and bring to class one of the books they stumbled upon. With this assignment, students learned to find themselves within the order of libraries, and engage in an act of disorder, in the serendipitous discovery of new books. In class, students shared their journey and books with one another, as well as wrote a reflection on the experience itself.
As such, within the first section of Shelf Life, students were able to explore and familiarize themselves with these sites for books, and begin tying together this approach with Erdrich’s text. This thematic section built an important foundation for the following weeks – in understanding both the organizational methods to books (both in format and in institutions such as the library), as well as the decay and danger of the book itself.
Sources:
Erdrich, Louise. The Sentence. Digital Edition, HarperCollins, 2021.