Floor Paleontology

Books currently on my floor and not on my shelves:

• Nicole Krauss' The History of Love (under jacket #1)
  
• Stuart Dybek's I Sailed with Magellan (by my guitar case)
  
• Norton Anthology of Western Music (Vol. 2) (by my dresser)
  
• Alex Ross' The Rest is Noise: Listening to the 20th Century (beneath a pair of jeans)
  
• The Paris Review Interviews (vol. 1) (by my bed)
  
• The Paris Review Interviews (vol. 2) (under my guitar)
• Dean Bakopoulos' Please Don't Come Back From the Moon (by my guitar case)
• Essentials of World Regional Geography (under a notebook and jacket #2)
  
• Gabriel Garcia Marquez's Memories of My Melancholy Whores (by my guitar)
• Nicholas Montemarano's If The Sky Falls (by my guitar case)
• Stuart Dybek's Childhood and Other Neighborhoods (on jacket #2)
  
• Frank Conroy's Body and Soul (beneath a towel)
  
• Tin House no. 34 "The Dead of Winter" (on a pair of gym shorts)
  

"Bird asked what a paleontologist was and Mom said that if he took a complete, illustrated guide to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, shred it into a hundred pieces, cast them into the wind from the museum's steps, let a few weeks pass, went back and scoured Fifth Avenue and Central Park for as many surviving scraps as he could find, then tried to reconstruct the history of painting, including schools, styles, genres, and names of painters from his scraps, that would be like being a paleontologist."
-Nicole Krauss, The History of Love