Where Are All These Books Going, Where Have They Been?

We have moved. And as my older daughter said, Wow, it feels like we're living in a hotel! Well, sure, if it's the kind of hotel that has exposed lathing in the walls, plaster dust on the floor, and no doors on any of the rooms! I did not say. Don't get me wrong. It's not that I wouldn't want to stay in a hotel like that. It's just that I've never seen one like that.

Really, the thing is that we still have a lot of things in boxes. And at this point in time, the majority of boxes still unpacked contain all of our books.

Now a bunch of years ago, a guy named Bill Gates (famous only around here due to a distant cousin who murdered his entire family) made some very nice built-in bookshelves for our office. Then we moved and Bill Gates built us more bookshelves. And Bill Gates, if you’re reading this, sometime soon we’re going to need some new bookshelves at our new, um, hotel.

But back when we had those beautiful shelves, we put all our books on them and then spent lots of time admiring them. The books were arranged mostly alphabetically by author, which surprised many visitors to our office. I can’t believe you actually alphabetize your books! people would say, as though we did something completely unheard of. Sometimes my husband would explain that he had really wanted to arrange them by their Library of Congress numbers (true), but sometimes he would not.

And yet the way they were mostly alphabetical is that we had a whole bunch of books that we had no idea how to arrange and so they took up their own shelves: books about beer, travel books, books about building bat houses and tapping maple syrup and raising chickens and making your own soap, etc. And then we had a bunch of shelves devoted to literary journals, which once we read during a brief window of our lives.

And now they’re all packed up in numbered boxes (naturally) and I have to say that I don’t exactly miss them. And I wonder why we have so many of them. I mean, it’s a nice thing to look at all the books you’ve read, books by a favorite author, say, or a book you might have completely forgotten about, until you happen to notice it on a shelf. But in another way, since I don’t tend to reread books all that often, those particular books aren’t really being used anymore. It’s not like our records (also boxed up in numbered boxes), which get used over and over again. The books are there, I suppose, for our kids to read someday, and for our friends to borrow. And to admire, as I do sometimes, since they really do look so pretty on those shelves. I suppose you can think of them like photographs (also boxed up, but who knows where) that capture a moment in time, the moment in your life that you were reading the book.

It took my older daughter some time to understand that books are printed in editions, so that a book we had that was first published in 1922 was not the actual book that was printed in 1922. And maybe it both is and isn’t important to have the exact copy of the book you read. But just seeing that span of books on the shelves, mostly alphabetical, and extremely patient, makes you remember your reading life. So that is probably a good enough reason to keep building bookshelves. And putting your books back up on them.

Catch-18*

Just as you should never really judge a book by its cover (though of course we all do) you should also never judge a book by its title (though again: of course). I do know for a fact that there is a book out that discusses the original titles of books before they were changed into famous book titles, such as Trimalchio in West Egg being the original title for The Great Gatsby. How I know this is that the author of this book was a guest on that public radio show in New York City I once worked for. This was at a time when books like this really were able to be published with ease. And the book actually had a publicity team behind it.

Anyway. One of the absolute best titles of a book I can think of (which is also an excellent book) is Alice Mattison's book of intersecting stories called Men Giving Money, Women Yelling. I mean, jeez, you practically don't even have to read the book. You can buy it and just admire that title every single time you look at the cover. Some titles, like Infinite Jest, for example, sound cool and seem important. Or then there are titles like Roddy Doyle's The Woman Who Walked Into Doors and even Junot Diaz's The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, which are wordy and evocative. In that category there is, of course, Raymond Carver's Will You Please Be Quiet Please?, which is a title that is very pleasing to say.

I find that one-word book titles don't really say enough, even though for bands that seems to be a fine way to go. The following are all good books, but they sound so ordinary: Jazz, Away, Intuition, Middlesex. The exception to this is Mary Roach's Stiff, a hilarious book about human cadavers.

There may actually be books that I have not read simply due to their titles, but I can't come up with any now. Well, here's one: Thermodynamics and an Introduction to Thermostatistics.

Whenever I think about writing a book, I actually like to think about the title most of all. I mean, then you’d just have to write the book, right? I’ve come up with Someone Else’s Weekend (there's nothing wrong with using a song lyric as a title, right, Brett Easton Ellis?), but as of yet I have not written that particular book. Somehow the title is almost too good for what I've been planning to write. It's getting me way too distracted. As far as I’m concerned, that particular title is up for grabs.

* The original title of Catch-22

Your One Wild and Precious Life

Last night my younger daughter asked me at dinner, Could you talk to us about something interesting? Like what? I asked. Time travel, she said.

Now this, like the macabre, is a topic of interest in our house, mostly fueled by my once mentioning the book Time and Again by Jack Finney, which I read I think in high school. I'm not sure it's a great book, but the premise of it has captured my interest for years and years. Basically a guy is involved in this secret government project that involves sending people back into the past. Due to a kind of unrelated mystery the guy asks to be sent back to New York City in 1882. In the present, the guy rents an apartment in the Dakota, an apartment that was apparently empty back in 1882. He will be traveling back in time, but staying in the same space. At this point, I need to point out two things. The Dakota was not completed until 1884, but apparently Jack Finney really wanted the Dakota to feature in his book. The other thing is the ease with which the guy was able to rent an apartment in the Dakota. The book was published in 1970, which, as many may recall, was not a fine time for New York City. Back then, you really could, as I know one couple that did, even buy an apartment in the Dakota for cheap. Anyway.

The part of the story that captured my imagination the most is the fact that every time this guy goes into the past and then returns to the present he is questioned for hours to see if any of his activities in the past changed anything in the present. The idea of this is fascinating. Just the smallest thing, simply asking a stranger for the time, say, could literally change history. Which ends up happening at the end of the book, if you'll forgive me for revealing it. And my girls and I have spent lots of time talking about small, seemingly minor incidents that happened in our lives that if changed would have had enormous consequences. Which has always been my way of telling them to pay attention to things. As Mary Oliver says in her perfect poem "The Summer Day": "I don't know exactly what a prayer is./I do know how to pay attention."

And so, our time travel discussion.

I think I'd want to go back into the past, I said. Maybe like Max's Kansas City in the early 1970s, I suggested, to which my husband nodded appreciatively. Then seeing the look on my girls' faces I said, Or how about visiting Laura Ingalls as a little girl? But not in the winter, of course, I added hastily. (To find out why, all you need to do is read her book The Long Winter. Note: it's all in the title.) The summer would be much better! Oh, I wouldn't want to be there in the summer, said my older daughter. Because they had to wear all those petticoats and it would be so hot! We agreed that the fall or spring would probably be the best time to go. But not the spring where they're still having blizzards, you know, I pointed out. Maybe like June.

But thinking about it now, I don't think we'd even be able to talk to Laura if we saw her because what if something we said caused her never to write those books we are all crazy about? It seems to me that even time travel would have to be about simply paying attention, kind of the way I am doing now on this summer day.

For Hilary, With Love and Squalor

Last night, driving home from our friends' house, it became obvious to me again that my daughters (ages 6 and 9) seem to share my fascination with the macabre. (Actually the last thing our friend told us as we left his house was a story about a guy he knew whose nail gun accidentally shot a nail directly into his stomach. It was the kind of story that I love hearing and then kind of wish I hadn't.)

Anyway, at one point during the car ride my older daughter asked if you could ever lose the ability to speak, and I explained about brain injuries that might make this possible. And then my younger daughter said, in this very serious way she has, Or like that story you told us. About that guy who got totally different after something went through his head. And I immediately remembered having one night at dinner brought up the story of Phineas Gage, a railroad worker, who, as a result of an explosion in 1848, ended up having an iron pole shoot straight through his brain and how, afterward, his entire personality changed. This story is interesting for two reasons because first, doctors studied him to learn how different parts of the brain correspond to different parts of human behavior, and second, a couple of years ago a man in a very old photograph was identified as Phineas Gage, ridiculously handsome, even with only one eye, holding the pole that had shot through his brain. But what kind of impressed me most was how vividly my girls remembered this story and how much time we have spent talking about it.

Which reminds me of these books my friend Hilary and I read obsessively the summer between seventh and eighth grade, on long bus rides to and from our Teen Travel day camp. I think the books were called Strange Unsolved Mysteries and More Strange Unsolved Mysteries, but I could be wrong about that. No doubt they are long out of print. These weren't so much mysteries as completely off-the-wall stories disguised as real mysteries. There were stories about small mysterious creatures that lived in people's walls and talked to them ("It Called Itself 'Gef'") or about dead people who came to life for a brief time in order to get things done. (I can't recall the title of this one, but basically a very pale boy goes to work on this woman's farm to earn money for his family, and each time he shows up for work he seems sicker and thinner until the woman finally feeds him a big meal, which causes him never to return. Soon after the woman is visited by the boy's mother who tells her that the boy died last year, but she called him back to earn some money for the family. The farm woman had fed him a salty meal, which as we all know causes you to remember where you came from, which in his case was a grave. We always buy unsalted butter as a result of this knowledge.)

So Hilary and I read these books over and over, passing them back and forth, exactly the same way my girls currently read Little Lulu comic books (more on this another time). The thing about these books is that they were really really creepy. But you simply couldn't put them down. I know that most girls our age were reading books like Forever, which we read too, but these unsolved mystery books spoke more to our sensibilities at this age, I think. Because when you are between seventh and eighth grade, really, what books can you relate to more than those about people who don't exactly fit in, like the, er, undead.

And I am certain that somewhere in Hilary's mother's apartment in Riverdale those books are still there, waiting. Just simply waiting for our own daughters to be old enough to read them.

It is August

So it's summertime, which usually means that people are reading a lot more now, and I understand why, but in my case it's just the reverse. When it's winter there is nothing more I want to do than sit (huddled, really) in front of my wood stove and read and read in the hours of darkness that are the upstate New York winter. When it's summer I lose all ability to focus on anything more than the stray New Yorker article, which ultimately never gets finished anyway. I'm always bringing things with me to read wherever I go, but summer is just so distracting that I just can't get any reading done. Recently I took my daughters to a lake and brought with me some printed pages of stories from my writing group, plus a David Sedaris book, which is one of the few things I can read any time of year. There was an older couple nearby who ended up moving a lot closer to me to get out of the sun and they seemed very interested in what I was reading. So interested that the man eventually asked me if I was a scientist since I seemed to be reading something so serious looking. The David Sedaris book had an X-ray of a skull on the cover, which I thought they were referring to, and so I proceeded to explain that he was, in fact, an essayist and a hilarious one at that. But no, the man said, those pages you were reading. Yes, said his (presumed) wife. It looks like you are reading very serious material. Oh, that's just stuff from my writing group, I told them, and explained how we meet twice a month and critique each other's stories. So, the man said, smiling, you want to be a writer! I am a writer, I snapped, probably unfairly. There was more to this conversation, but my point here is that had I been reading perhaps a Dan Brown book I probably would have been left alone.

But this brings me to another point, which is that I am fascinated by what other people are reading all the time. If I see someone anywhere with a book, I feel like it's my right to know what they are reading, and I will go out of my way just to see the cover. And then, sometimes, I will even try to talk to that person about the book they are reading, especially if I have read it myself. This does not always go well. But then, see, I rarely feel like talking about what I'm reading when questioned about it because usually I don't feel like talking and would just like to keep, um, reading, which is exactly what I never think of when I start talking to other people who are reading. Once, many years ago, I was reading Don DeLillo's White Noise on the subway and a woman across from me smiled and said, Now Don DeLillo. He's a real writer. I smiled back and said, Yes, he really is. But usually it's not like that at all. It's more like, Oh, I saw that book once. What's it about? which I never know how to answer because most books aren't really "about" something. Or at least something you can sum up in a sentence or two. What is White Noise about exactly? Well, there's this guy who's a professor, but then there's all these toxic chemicals released into the air, and then. I really am not very good at this.

So when I see someone reading a book, I will comment if I've read the book before, and I will usually say something like, Oh, isn't that book so great? And I find myself quite surprised when people don't automatically want to engage in a long, long discussion with me involving what made the book so great, and what they thought about that previous book the author wrote, and the fact that the author actually grew up in Baltimore but now lives in Brooklyn and etc. etc. Because the thing that never occurs to me, until maybe right this moment, is that the person in question almost always wants to just keep on, um, reading. Which is pretty much what I always want to keep doing. Unless it's a hot summer day, of course. And there's a lake nearby.

My Problem with Gary Shteyngart

I don't think he's funny at all. At all.

ETA: Here I am being so self righteous. And so wrong!

Nothing Lasts Forever

Sidney Sheldon, the world's most translatable author, died in 2007. I discovered him as a young adult, but my secret compulsion to read him did not quite end there. Once, in my 20s, while temping and snooping around, I discovered a Sidney Sheldon novel in my desk. That was all it took. I began to read it first at my desk, and then since I couldn't stop, under my desk, completely consumed. I could do nothing else but read that book. But that's pretty much what Sidney Sheldon's novels are like. It's not like you even have a choice really. Even his New York Times obituary had this to say: "Though most critics were united in their dismissal of Mr. Sheldon, a few conceded, grudgingly, that his work could be hard to put down." Well, yes, and as the man himself claimed in a 1982 interview: "I try to write my books so the reader can't put them down."

All right. So on this many agree. You can't put a Sidney Sheldon novel down. But why pick one up in the first place? Well, you certainly didn't read his books for their exquisitely crafted sentences. I mean, here's a nice example from Rage of Angels: "She sat ramrod straight, as though bracing herself against unseen ghosts of the past." Exactly. But at the same time who could resist the plot twists of his incredibly unrealistic but extremely satisfying stories of revenge. To generalize: his novels featured a young woman from a sad but hopeful background who struggled her way to the top. By the time she was an adult she was rich and beautiful and had an enviable life. Of course, you could read something like that anywhere. But no, that wasn't the whole story. You see, somewhere along the way, somehow in her life, this woman was wronged. Usually she was wronged by men who had taken advantage of her youth and innocence. It doesn't matter how or why this happened. Once this woman had made her way to the top, she spent the rest of her life tracking down and ruining the lives of anyone who had wronged her. And that was the satisfaction.

Sometimes it would take years for the revenge to take place. The woman would reacquaint herself with the person or people who had wronged her. Of course, now as a rich glamorous woman, she was completely unrecognizable from the poor waif she had once been. Amazingly, and in every novel, no one would ever remember having met this woman before. Which was perfect! She could just take her time, perhaps even allow some man to fall in love with her...and then strike! Revenge could take a number of forms: running a successful business into the ground, destroying a blissfully happy marriage, or sometimes it was just death. I still cannot forget the image of a woman casually tossing a blow dryer into a bathtub, where her unfortunate soon-to-be-electrocuted lover was bathing. This vivid scene taught me, at the age of 12, exactly how water and electricity do not mix.

I suppose what I learned from Sidney Sheldon is that life should not really be like a Sidney Sheldon novel. Spending your time obsessed with payback, though tempting, is probably not the best way to go about your days. And who really has the fortitude to build up a vast empire only to bring it down yourself in a glorious blaze of revenge? I confess that I probably couldn't manage this, no matter how ruthlessly I tried. And to be honest, it's not that I really liked Sidney Sheldon's books, so much as I am glad that I read them. Or rather couldn't help but read them. Or whatever it was that kept me turning the pages until I found that suddenly there were no more left to read.