Facebook and My Bookshelves: A Shaky Comparison

Yesterday I got a set of floor-to-ceiling bookshelves built in my office (actually, they're Ikea shelves nailed to the wall so they don't fall on my head) so that I can at last unpack the forty cartons of books that have been stored away from three moves ago, in 2001. This morning, as I spent a couple of hours unpacking them, I was hit with so many rushes of memory that it was like attending my own, personal reunion.

In fact, I can't help being struck by the similarities of my dusty piles of books and my new Facebook "friends," though the last time I saw my copy of Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man, a book I read in college and detested because of the way the professor abused the one African-American in the class, and my inscribed copy of Stefan Kanfer's The Last Empire: De Beers, Diamonds, and the World, written by someone with whom I'm no longer in touch, Facebook didn't exist. 

Having carted around some books for decades that I have never read and likely never will, I'm now wondering, Do I toss Don DeLillo's Underworld in the give-away bin at the Cleveland Park Library or put it on my shelf to take up space of which I now MIRACULOUSLY have too much in order to pretend that I'm more erudite than I really am? Is the point of putting books on a bookshelf to keep the ones you've actually read and treasure, for whatever reason? (I can't part with my Kanfer book, for example, because it reads: "For Linda A lovely lady of talent, true grit, and talent from her secular rabbah," and I'm sure it's the only time my name will ever be in the same sentence with talent x two. Not to mention that when I was just getting started in journalism, I met him in a used bookstore in Hastings-on-Hudson, New York, and he was incredibly generous to me.) Is it to stockpile the un-reads for the future, which, in my case means I won't need to borrow or buy another book until 3001?

My list of Facebook friends is much the same. There are the friends I talk to every day, anyway, but there's a much longer list of "friends" whom I've spoken to rarely--if ever. And may never. Don't get me wrong: I love being able to be touch with people from high school I didn't get to know back in the day. And as one "friend" of a friend who from elementary school said, we're recreating our Brownie troop on Facebook one person at a time. It's pretty incredible that these people, once lost in time, are now a click away. 

Facebook makes me feel that the world is small and manageable and, as I've blogged about before, I think that there's a kind of circling of the wagons from our youth as our parents age and get sick. It means something to hear from someone who knew my mom and dad when they were in their forties. It's valuable to have the same references to the same stupid songs from 1977. Who else but those in my senior class from The Lovett School in Atlanta would know the significance of "Build Me Up Buttercup" and be able to sing it word for word?

Still, I have to wonder, as with my books, is the point of Facebook to amass sheer numbers? Is the person with 6,035 "friends" a lot cooler than the person with 7 "friends," even if they're both only really in touch with 5 of those people? And like the books I know I'll never read, what's the protocol about un-friending people, though unlike a book, they take up no room in cyber-space.

These are the questions I'm pondering as I put the Anne Tyler books from my twenties on the shelf alongside a copy of a Dorothy Parker book that belonged to my grandmother, Nick Hornsby's High Fidelity, and Amitav Ghosh's Sea of Poppies. The lesson I'm taking from all this is that I'm used to my life being organized in neat categories. Books are arranged by the Dewey Decimal System. Friends are from college or my first marriage or Sam's daycare class. But now I realize that the old categories don't hold. My shelves are a mish-mash and now, because of Facebook, so are my friends. And I like it that way.