“We, the library”

I came across this tweet around the time Kirn (substack here) posted it, and it continues to haunt me.

I don’t know how many physical books I have collected. Five or six hundred, perhaps. It seems, to me, to be “not a lot,” so it shocked me just now when I quickly estimated the count.

If they were shelved compactly in one place, they might cover one wall or so of a smallish room. And yet. They take up space and gather dust. And every time I move (I have moved, on average, every 3.5 years since I graduated college — does it ever end, this moving?) they are such a troublesome thing to pack and unpack and sort and re-shelve.

So when my sweet father, who read books constantly, gave me a Kindle (I’d begged him not to, but he loved his so much, and so much liked to share that kind of thing with his family) I thought, okay, now I’ll be able to read on without piling up more and more physical books. This is good, I thought. “I’m comfortable that certain experiences are supposed to be ephemeral,” I blogged. “I’m okay with some books as experiences rather than things.”

But then came the stories about Amazon erasing peoples’ books from their Kindles (some sort of issue with copyright or publisher disputes, the story would go) and I became a bit uneasy.

When you buy a “book” for an e-reader, you don’t really own the book, as it turns out. You have paid for permission to read something that belongs to someone else. And “they” can take back that permission any time they please. (And my father’s Kindle? The books on my father’s Kindle? I took photos of the screen — screens, pages of them — so that I would know what books he “owned.” They are gone, now that he’s passed and no longer “pays” for his “account.” There’s your “ephemeral.”)

I have also had a longtime habit of picking up used books that struck me as unusual, or that I learned would be going out of print. I bought an old edition of The Joy of Cooking when I learned that new editions have dropped the recipes for cooking game. I read at some point years ago that Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations was being revised — modernized — so I hunted down a second-hand copy (the centennial edition published in 1955). (I adore that book. It may be my take-on-a-desert-island-game book.)

Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 1955 Centennial Edition

I’m old enough to have lived through the transition as second-hand booksellers began selling online. It drove up the price of old books — that copy of Lyrics of a Lowly Life by Paul Laurence Dunbar that I picked up for 50 cents in a junk store in my home town in the early ’80s would be displayed in a locked case, today, and likely priced at $100 or more. (Of course you can buy reprints of it for pennies — have you ever bought a book, thinking it was second-hand, only to find out it was a cheaply made reproduction? The quality so poor it was basically unreadable? I have. I will not, ever again, if I can help it.)

And I remember as well reading — also years ago — that decorators were buying up antique hardcover books — the ones with ornately decorated covers and gilt-edges pages — and using them as, well, decorations. In some cases they were gutting the books and using just the covers. Because what mattered wasn’t the words inside but the effect walls of books would convey, the image they’d convey of erudition.

Lyrics of a Lowly Life by Paul Laurence Dunbar.

It was around this time that I became weary of being outraged. Is that cynicism?

Not to say that I’m no longer outraged, ever. I am, believe me.

But — and this is more pronounced now than ever, since I lost both of my parents (within a span of less than a year), my birth family now basically as gutted as a home decorator’s empty books, not to mention these godawful exhausting never-ending lockdowns — I am, more and more, handling my outrage by becoming quiet, by turning inward. I am thinking — all the time, basically — about soul, and about words, and about preservation. Not preservation of myself but of what really matters — what will always matter.

Thinking about whether the outward things I preserve, the words I preserve, could ever help someone else, one day, grope a bit closer to some faint Light.

That I shouldn’t gamble with such a thing.

It’s been several years, now, since I began to regard my Kindle as a device, solely, for what I consider to be throwaway books — I know that sounds pejorative but what I mean is books I would under any circumstances read only once and then pass along (and the Kindle is also very good for reading samples for free).

I’ve started to buy up physical copies of the books on my Kindle that I do not consider one-time reads.

Which leads, of course, into the next phase of my weird relationship with Amazon. (Seems it’s always about Amazon, isn’t it?) Now with their new policies, their decision to start taking books off their platform — once again reminding me as it does all writers of our uneasy truce with That Company: I am utterly dependent on Amazon if I’m ever to sell my novels in any numbers whatever; “my” readers are not really “mine,” they are Amazon’s “customers,” no matter how ridiculous and unfair that may be (and before you defend them — because yes, I know they do me a service by building their platform and attracting traffic and letting me sell my books there — when I have, in the past, bought other things from them, cosmetics or whatever, I have gotten emails from the seller, I have gotten direct mail, snail male from the seller. How can other vendors “own” customers that came to them via Amazon but writers cannot? There is no happy answer to this, I suppose. I suppose these other sellers have done their own fulfillment. I suppose there are so many writers that we are, to Amazon, something of an unwashed hoard, with a handful of exceptions more trouble than we’re worth.)

In any event, I’ve been going to Alibris instead of Amazon more and more. Telling myself maybe that helps, in some small way, other booksellers (“hello?” “echo echo echo…”). And I am picking up more and more second-hand copies of old books. Despite the fact that my shelves are full and we’ll likely be moving again sometime in the not-too-distant future and once again I’ll be packing books in boxes…

And I am increasingly aware of how I feel, when I sit near my shelves of books, thinking or journaling or writing, and I need to look something up and I scan my titles and find a book and page through it. Like right now, for example. Marshall McLuhan, The Global Village (I own the Oxford University Press 1989 edition):

All media are a reconstruction, a model of some biologic capability speeded up beyond the human ability to perform: the wheel is an extension of the foot, the book is an extension of the eye, clothing an extension of the skin, and electronic circuitry is an extension of the central nervous system…

The Global Village by Marshall McLuhan

My books — I feel this as I sit near them, scan their titles — are also an extension of my mind, of my memory. I very often go back to books I read decades ago (I haven’t opened the McLuhan in probably 20 years) with that same felt sense that arises when we go back into our mind’s memory banks to pull something out that we once experienced and would like to look at it again and draw upon, again, because it will add some sort of richness or meaning to what is happening now, today.

So if I look for a title and can’t find it right away (I don’t have enough space on my shelves; about half of my books are stacked behind the other half; my books hide on me, sometimes) I become anxious, even, at times, agitated. It’s like I’ve lost a bit of what should be there, should be recallable. (I was looking the other day, for my copy of The Great Gatsby and can’t find it and it still bothers me…did I lend it to someone? Should I buy another copy? Would I be able to find the same edition I owned?)

Ephemeral, indeed.

Sigh.

Buy physical books now. Great ones, good ones, bad ones, ones you happen to like. Store them safely as you would treasures. They are. Some will become unavailable soon, I suspect, for reasons that may not be stated candidly. If I’m wrong, what have you lost?

We, the library.

Walter Kirn

Books as an extension of mind — an extension of our thoughts and memories. Individually and collectively.

“We, the library.”

What happens to our books, if we, their contemporary guardians, decide to begin culling them?

And if we cull them, what injury are we committing that we cannot feel (the brain can’t feel pain, right?) but that will one day exact an awful price — one day we’ll wake up and sense a gaping hole where, we know, some memory ought to be?

I am buying more books, now, than I’ve bought since I was in college. Unapologetically. Knowing that it means I have more “stuff” that I will need to cart around, that someone will one day have to dispose us when I am dead.

Unapologetically.

WWW Wednesdays :-)

Via Should Be Reading, another game, w00t!

To play along, just answer the following three (3) questions…

• What are you currently reading?
• What did you recently finish reading?
• What do you think you’ll read next?

My answers . . .

What are you currently reading? This is a bit of a dupe from yesterday of course — Charterhouse of Parmaa 19th century French novel by Stendhal.

What did you recently finish reading? Portrait of a Lady by Henry James and An Absence of Angels by Julie Harris. (Historical fiction, enjoyed it very much!)

What do you think you’ll read next? I just found out this morning that Wickedly Charming, a novel by Kristine Grayson, a.k.a. Kristine Kathryn Rusch, is available for free this week on Kindle. Rusch’s husband Dean Wesley Smith writes that the book is “about publishing. It is wonderful fun and even has Sheldon McArthur the book dealer as a character.”

I downloaded a copy and I bet that’s what I read next :-)

Speaking of books that make a difference . . .

It’s easy enough to assert that books “make a difference” — now Alain de Botton has gone a step further to explain how:

One effect of writing . . . is that, once readers have put the book down and resumed their own lives, they may attend to precisely the things that the author would have responded to had he or she been in their company.

Thanks to a book, their minds will be like a radar newly attuned to pick up certain objects floating through consciousness. The effect will be like bringing a radio into a room that we had thought silent, only to realize that the silence existed at a particular frequency and we, in fact, shared the room all along with waves of sound coming in from a Ukrainian station or the nighttime chatter of a minicab firm.

Have you ever experienced this by reading a novel?

What novel, and how did it affect you?

Kindling

A little over a year ago, my dad bought a Kindle.

If you knew my dad, you’d know he was a gadget-loving sort of guy. He loves being the first around to own that new thing with the plugs and the screens and the User Interface.

Another thing about my dad — he loves to splurge on Christmas gifts for his family.

Meaning that when Christmas comes around, if he’s fallen in love with a new gadget, look out. You might be getting one, too.

And I didn’t want a Kindle.

I told him. Dad. Do NOT buy me a Kindle for Christmas.

It worked–that year.

But then I guess he must have forgotten–either accidentally or accidentally on purpose. Because this last Christmas, I opened an innocent-looking little box and there it was. Not the same version my dad has–mine is small, a footprint about the size of a mass market paperback. Which is good, I’m glad he didn’t spend too much money on it.

And I love it.

I love how little it is. I love that I can buy books completely on impulse. I love that I can buy books cheap. No more walking out of Barnes & Noble with 3 books, my checking account $100 lighter. I’ve downloaded something like 17 P.G. Wodehouse books to my Kindle for FREE–enough Wodehouse to keep me in a good humor for YEARS.

I’ve actually bought a few hardcover books since Christmas as well (I’m reading Empire of the Summer Moon: Quanah Parker and the Rise and Fall of the Comanches, the Most Powerful Indian Tribe in American History in hardcover right now — a gift from another of the sweet guys in my life — which is an amazing book btw). I don’t want to own everything in electronic form. I guess, for me, there are books I want to own as books, and books I purely for the experience of reading them . . . it dovetails with something I’m doing in general in my life, which is trying to shed stuff — I’m selling things, giving things away, anything to reduce my possessions to the bare minimum, to lighten my footprint, to make myself more mobile, more flexible. I’m comfortable that certain experiences are supposed to be ephemeral. I’m okay with experiencing some books as experiences rather than things.

Speaking of ephemera, ebook readers themselves aren’t necessarily settled out in their final form, IMO. My best guess is that some day there will be universal devices that offer an ereading experience close enough to the Kindle’s that we won’t need dedicated devices.

But in the meantime, come 9:30 at night when it’s 6 below zero outside, that’s me under the covers with my feet resting on a hot water bottle and a Kindle in my lap . . .

Step away from the book

In the Telegraph, Nick Hornby wonders at our insistence on reading “difficult” books:

. . . we have got it into our heads that books should be hard work, and that unless they’re hard work, they’re not doing us any good.

I recently had conversations with two friends, both of whom were reading a very long political biography that had appeared in many of 2005’s ‘Books of the Year’ lists.

They were struggling. Both of these people are parents – they each, coincidentally, have three children – and both have demanding full-time jobs. And each night, in the few minutes they allowed themselves to read before sleep, they ploughed gamely through a few paragraphs about the (very) early years of a 20th-century world figure.

At the rate of progress they were describing, it would take them many, many months before they finished the book, possibly even decades. (One of them told me that he’d put it down for a couple of weeks, and on picking it up again was extremely excited to see that the bookmark was much deeper into the book than he’d dared hope. He then realised that one of his kids had dropped it, and put the bookmark back in the wrong place. He was crushed.)

Hornby then comes to a theme I’ve blogged about before: the artificial & unhelpful split between “literary” and “commercial” fiction. We’ve come to believe that there’s something superior about books that are difficult or that better us, somehow. But perhaps this is a conceit:

Those Dickens-readers who famously waited on the dockside in New York for news of Little Nell – were they hoping to be educated? Dickens is literary now, of course, because the books are old.

But his work has survived not because he makes you think, but because he makes you feel, and he makes you laugh, and you need to know what is going to happen to his characters.

Read the article & then let me know what you think. Is it best if people read soley for the sheer pleasure of it?