It’ll be four weeks this coming Friday since my basement flooded, and, believe it or not, I’m still working on cleaning up and putting my house back together. The ridiculous length of time it’s taking me to finish this job is a sum of many factors: the sheer magnitude of the job, which I’ll talk more about in another entry; my easy distractibility and tendency toward procrastination, which is a fancy way of saying I haven’t been working on it steadily; a recent bout of the flu that left me not wanting to tote boxes up and down stairs; and the fact that I’ve actually been trying to save many of the things that got wet rather than just tossing them, especially a number of books that I’ve been reluctant to part with.

I think at this point, however, I’ve got to admit that I’ve salvaged all the volumes I can, and anything that still hasn’t dried out or been rendered useful again is too far gone to keep. That’s okay, though — in the end, I didn’t do too badly. At least, I don’t think I did. I wasn’t exactly keeping inventory notes during that first crazy day, and I wouldn’t be surprised if at least one stack of soggy thrift-store paperbacks ended up in the bin without anybody bothering to tell me. No doubt there will come a day when I’ll find myself saying, “Hey, I think I used to have a copy of such-and-such. I wonder whatever happened to it…”
But I still managed to save quite a few books that had taken on water, and most of them even flattened out after being dried and placed under weight for a few days, at least flat enough that they’re not totally unpleasant to hold and read. But there were others that didn’t fare so well. Just in case you’re curious, I’ve prepared a list:

(Maybe some kind soul out there would consider replacing one of these as a token of appreciation? Just kidding. If nothing else, though, I figure this list will give you voyeuristic types some insight into what kind of junk I like to read…)

Saved, but not pretty:

(As the heading suggests, these are the titles that are still readable, but they no longer have much aesthetic value. I feel especially bad about the first two on the list, a pair of absolutely beautiful — not to mention expensive — coffee-table books that were gifts to me from my mother and The Girlfriend, respectively.)

• Ray Harryhausen: An Animated Life (Ray Harryhausen with Tony Dalton)
• A Century of Movie Posters: From Silent to Art House (Emily King)
• The Tokaido Road: A Novel of Feudal Japan (Lucia St. Clair Robson)
• The Collected Stories of Wallace Stegner

Terminal water damage:

(These would be the books that were too thoroughly soaked to offer any hope of salvage.)

• Sin in Soft Focus: Pre-Code Hollywood (Mark A. Viera)
• Ernest Hemingway: Selected Letters 1917-1961 (ed. Carlos Baker)
• That’s Not All Folks!: My Life in the Golden Age of Cartoons and Radio (Mel Blanc with Philip Bashe)
• Chuck Berry: The Autobiography (Chuck Berry, duh!)
• California Dreamin’: The True Story of The Mamas and The Papas (Michelle Phillips)
• The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts (Maxine Hong Kingston)
• Remembering Denny (Calvin Trillin)
• Wired: The Short Life and Fast Times of John Belushi (Bob Woodward)
• The Falcon and the Snowman: A True Story of Friendship and Espionage (Robert Lindsey)
• The Executioner’s Song (Norman Mailer)
• Wiseguy: Life in a Mafia Family (Nicolas Pileggi)
• Death Comes for the Archbishop (Willa Cather)
• Bright Lights, Big City (Jay McInerney)

Lost to mold:

(This last group was perhaps the most frustrating, books that weren’t damaged too badly by the water but within a couple of days had become too stinky and/or furry to risk touching with bare hands. To add insult to injury, two of these titles are out of print as well, so replacing them may be tricky…)

• Citizen Kane: The Fiftieth Anniversary Album (Harlan Lebo)
• Graveyards of the Pacific: From Pearl Harbor to Bikini Island (Robert D. Ballard with Michael Hamilton Morgan)
• Howard Hughes: The Hidden Years (James Phelan)

The real hell of it is that I hadn’t even read most of these. C’est la vie, I suppose.

Oh, one final non-book casualty that may be worth mentioning: I regret to inform that The Big Stupid Cylon Head also did not survive being inundated. The DVDs that came with it were, luckily, upstairs at the time, but I no longer have the World’s Stupidest Packaging to kick around. Oddly, I don’t feel very bad at all about that particular loss…