books

The first time a friend came to visit me in our new house in Halifax, he noticed our books. Not specific books. But the number of books. We had a lot of books, he remarked.

He didn’t know the half of it. At the time, we were only partially moved in, and most of our books were still in St. John’s, where they’d wait for another year before our full move in August 2023.

Books are cozy. They make me feel warm. They’re soft, intimate, welcoming. Books are invitations and I always need to have a few (umm … several?) close at hand.

The problem with moving, however, is that books weigh a lot and when moves include ferry travel? Well. Not every book can come along. Decisions must be made. Hard ones.

I know from experience that I inevitably get things wrong. I’ll gift books I should have kept. I’ll keep books I should have gifted. Invariably, I’ll spend the years after a move madly searching for books I’m pretty sure I kept but can no longer find. Often I’ll find them, eventually at least. Sometimes I don’t, but whatever happens, I’ll definitely find all sorts of other treasures along the way.

This morning, I found the very first peer-reviewed article I ever published (which, according to one reviewer, had a “crashing non sequiter” and wasn’t worth the paper it was written on). 2008! Good times.

This morning, I went hunting for my copy of Childbirth by Choice’s No Choice: Canadian Women Tell Their Stories of Illegal Abortion. I picked it up second hand about fifteen years ago. It’s an eye opening read about the the kinds of things pregnant folks did before abortion as decriminalized in 1969 (as long as a “Therapeutic Abortion Committee” signed off on it).

I’ve drawn on this book many times over the years, both for research and for teaching. My students, most of whom were born after the Morgentaler decision in 1988, cannot fathom a world without legal (and relatively unrestricted) access to contraception or legal (though often inaccessible) access to abortion. For them, these stories – some of which are truly harrowing – offer a window into a completely different world, a world in which they would have understood themselves and their social positions very differently. Legal contraception and abortion have completely transformed not only the lives of folks who can get pregnant, but also society as a whole. Pregnant folks are no longer reducible to their biologies, and thank goodness for that.

But I can’t find No Choice. I’ve looked upstairs. I’ve looked downstairs. I’ve looked in our little garden studio. I’ve looked, in other words, all over. And I haven’t found this slim volume with its dark spine and red title text.

I’ve found other things: Pierre Berton’s The Secret World of Og (one of my favourite childhood reads – I even wrote to PB and got a reply on green paper and signed with green ink and it answered every single one of my questions);

*The copy I bought for my kids; far shinier than the one I borrowed from our small town library when I was a kid.*

The Poems of Wilfred Owen (purchased in 1988, after performing Benjamin Britten’s War Requiem and being introduced to Owen’s powerful witness of the grief of war);

*purchased in Victoria, BC. Maybe at Munro’s?*

Johann Joachim Quantz’s On Playing the Flute (one of the bibles of historically-informed flute playing: at one point, I think I could have recited parts of this book for you);

*Quantz’s instructions for baby flute players, dutifully marked up by yours truly sometimes around 1993.*

Shulamith Firestone’s The Dialectic of Sex (published in 1970 but as radical today as it was then, a book that confounds, enrages, and inspires my students);

Y-Dang Troeung’s Landbridge: Life in Fragments (one of the first books I purchased in Halifax after our full move, that shattered my heart when I first read it);

Helen Humphreys’ Nocturne: On the Life and Death of My Brother (which I immediately put onto my re-read pile);

*When I posted about this book on my social media, I discovered that a friend had dated Humphreys’ brother.*

my three editions of L.M. Montgomery’s The Blue Castle (why have only one when you can have three? At one point I also had three editions of Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex);

and a book of Surinamese folksongs from my choral director grandfather’s collection (gifted to me by my grandmother, a few decades after my grandfather’s passing).

What I’ve found aren’t just books, but stories of books. I’ve found memories. I’ve found myself. I can trace the trajectory of my life through books. I know where I was when I read them, and I know what I was doing. Books are my guides, my anchors, my inspirations. They tell me who I was, who I am, and who I want to be. I don’t know who I’d be without books.

I still can’t find No Choice. Any suggestions for where to look next?

(c) Sonja Boon, 2025.

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