The Best Little Hoardhouse

For the Love of Books

By Zach Hively

This was a challenge I did not expect: Tell me what you’re good at.

A friend recently asked me this—to list ten of my top skills or abilities. That’s it. Just ten things. The hard part should have been limiting myself to ten. Limiting myself to ten is most definitely not one of my top skills. But I learned one of my top skills is also not remembering all, or any, of the very many things I’m good at.

So I asked my friend for a clue: What is something I can do well?
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“Well,” my friend said, “you’re very tidy.”

This was not the sort of glowing clue I had anticipated. But I accepted it graciously—there, that’s one of my top skills, accepting underwhelming compliments with grace—even if it was wrong, because it is impossible for me to be tidy. After all, I love books. One human being contains multitudes, but one cannot contain both tidiness and book-love.

And I do mean LOVE books. One can HAVE books and demonstrate immaculately tidiness, in that Scandinavian showroom or Japanese spa sort of way. Each book, neatly dusted, right where it belongs. Shelved, more than likely, by color and height or some other preposterous aesthetic.

But loving books implies a particular comfy disarray. From where I sit, I see four stacks of books dislodged from any of the major bookshelves in my home: one stack on a stool stepping in as an end table; one by the front door; one by an armchair; and one on a kitchen counter, perilously close to where I do the dishes when a friend is coming over and I want to appear tidy.

Then there are the bookshelves themselves: fairly neat, by design, books stood in rows of colorful spines. But they exude a certain chaos, too—unalphabetized, for starters, though with a catalogue system I understand intuitively yet inarticulably. More than this, though, the books lurk rather airily: some leering, some lounging; a few might as well be heckling me to read them. They are like the crows that fill a leafless cottonwood tree, in full cahoots—and I keep bring more home. (Books, that is, not crows, though I am not opposed.)

The tidy thing to do would be to go digital, put every title I ever wanted on a device, linked to my account. But I do not want to be tidy. I want to be terrible at such tidiness—and terribly happy, here in the best little hoardhouse this side of Texas, surrounded by so many things I don’t yet know, so many things I might just yet get good at.

***Speaking of books: the Kickstarter campaign for Call Me Zach Hively Because That Is My Name is in full swing. We have stretch goals—possibilities for an audiobook and collectible book editions among them.

This is also your first chance to get the ebook (if you’re that kind of tidy) and your only chance to get a hardcover (if you’re that kind of bibliophile).
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But the most important thing is that the campaign has succeeded. We’re beyond 180% of our goal, which means that this book is getting published no matter what. Thank you all who have pledged support so far to make this collection a reality.