Writers and newlyweds Emily Maloney and Ori Fienberg don’t shy away from difficult projects.
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Not only are they in the middle of a major renovation of their Evanston home — the first floor is gutted and they inhabit the rehabbed second floor — but they’ve also combined or, as they like to call it, “commingled” their books, everything from sci-fi and fantasy to lyric essays and medical textbooks.
“It was difficult,” Maloney says. “We actually talked with a rabbi in our pre-wedding counseling about whether or not we’d want to combine bookshelves.”
They had to purge some too — especially Fienberg, who discovered during a post-college move that he owned a metric ton of books.
Some duplicates remain: David Shields’ “Remote”; “A Postcard Memoir” by Lawrence Sutin.
“For a while we held on to two copies of Claudia Rankine’s ‘Don’t Let Me Be Lonely,’ because we didn’t want them to be lonely,” Maloney says.
“But then we gave one away to a lonely friend,” Fienberg says.
Problem solved.