A person's books

"I hated this class," a person says, flipping through pages full of underlinings and scribbles that read like postcards from youth.

The book goes into the "tentative" pile, which is usually a lot bigger than the "town library" or "dump swap shop and recycling" piles. The sorry truth is that some of the books awaiting judgment as "tentatives" were lugged home from the dump who knows how many years ago because people with sagging shelves find somebody else's throw-aways irresistible.

Charles Dickens and Mark Twain generally come home from the dump because leaving them there seems disrespectful. And even though one might already own a copy of "Tess of the D'Urbervilles," one takes pity and scoops her up, figuring she's been through enough with Thomas Hardy.

There is no such love felt for one's weighty collection of unread nonfiction by important people -- or their ghostwriters -- who pulled down astronomical advances and then made more on the bestseller list. A person picks up David Stockman's old tome and thinks: "I'm supposed to understand supply-side economics but don't have a clue."

A bookmark stuck in Chapter 2 is testament to one's proclivity for starting things and tossing them aside, for succumbing to hype, celebrity, and an ego that insists one must at least try to appear au courant -- never mind that one has yet to finish "Moby-Dick."

Melville stays on the bookshelf with Dickens and Twain, but Stockman goes tentative -- along with his boss in that strange hernia-maker of a Ronald Reagn biography, "Dutch," by Edmund Morris.

Hillary Clinton stays, for she is still in the news and may yet have a shot at being read in ponderous fullness instead of mere sizzly excerpts.

Right.

But what of the millennium? Retrospectives on the last thousand years, or last 100, purchased at the height of the Y2K frenzy seem rather slapdash and arbitrary now -- although not quite tentative, given that this is the only new millennium one will get.

A person swirling in such analyses must square the shoulders and stop thinking, for sometimes the best one can do is let go of all tentatives -- someone else will surely be glad to have them.

A pared-down shelf can clear the mind as well as a room, giving a person a better sense of what's there and why. It might also prevent a biblio-avalanche from one day burying the desk -- or, in some cases, the entire house.