by Brian Doyle
Pretty much every other person I talked to had overdue library books (one man had more than sixty) in the car, and pretty much everyone with overdue library books thanked me for making them remember their overdue library books, which they were absolutely going to return posthaste, but I bet they didn’t. Eleven people had Bibles of various translations, one man had a Gideon Bible he claimed to have borrowed from a motel, one woman had a Tao Te Ching, and one man, not a priest, carried an Italian-language Catholic missal; interestingly not one person had a Book of Mormon, which Mark Twain, bless his testy heart, memorably called pretentious, sleepy, insipid, tedious, a mess, a mongrel, and chloroform in print, among other compliments. But then no one had a Qur’an either, or a psalm book, or a memoir of seven-fingered circus performers in Samoa, so there you go.
Among the authors represented in cars are the greats (Borges, Chekhov, Agatha Christie, Beverly Cleary, Don DeLillo, Scott Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Maugham, Thurber, Yeats), the very goods (Richard Flanagan, Joseph Mitchell, Philip Roth, J.K. Rowling, George Saunders, Colm Toibin, and the late Kurt Vonnegut), the goods (Eggers, Kerouac, Kingsolver, Lamott, Quindlen), and many whom I am not qualified to qualify, like Margaret Mitchell and Brian Jacques and Julia Child and Georges Simenon, you could get into endless roaring pub arguments here, asking dangerous questions like, Is Gone With the Wind the most popular bad book ever written? and If millions of people flip through Julia Child every day does that make her a great writer? and Are Brian Jacques and writers like him who wake up millions of kids to stories really the most influential and cool writers ever far more than people like James Joyce? and Is Georges Simenon a great writer for having created a vast saga of French life and character or was he, like G.K. Chesterton and Thomas Merton, one of those poor scribblers who never had an unpublished thought? But I am not going to ask those questions publicly, not me.
In the end the single best-represented author in cars was Theodor Seuss Geisel, whose books far outnumbered those of any other author in the cars of the people I spoke to, although to be honest most of the people I spoke to were parents who either had kids young enough to relish the good Doctor, or they, the parents, had never actually cleaned the Doctor Seuss books out of the car after their kids went off to college or to join the circus in Samoa or whatever. It cheers me up to think of all those Doctor Seuss books in all those cars; somehow the world doesn’t seem quite so bruised and brooding once you know that in a reading emergency you can reach under your seat and pull out David Donald Doo or the Katzes from Blooie to Prooie, not to mention Sally Spingel Spungel Sporn. And right there, with the wild music of one of the greatest of American writers of all ringing in our ears, let us drive on into the rest of the day.
On Reading in Bed
Which we have all done, idly or assiduously, thoroughly or haphazardly, in sickness and in health, for richer or poorer, and may well do until death do us part from the teetering pile of novels we have been reading in bed since last summer, drooling on the pages as we fall asleep, propped on one arm, our spectacles surfing down our noses, until the moment that we snap awake suddenly and for a split second wonder where exactly we are, and why we are naked, and who drooled on Dostoyevsky.
But there are many happy hours when we are stark raving awake, and find ourselves reading happily in the broad beam of the bed — in the morning here and there, when no one is around to sound the sluggishness alarm; and in the afternoon sometimes, before a nap, for twenty delicious inky minutes; and occasionally in the evening, if cooking duties have been evaded successfully for religious reasons, and there is a parenthetical hour when you can curl up and knock off a hundred pages off, say, the endless tomes of W.L.S. Churchill, who apparently never had an unpublished thought, the poor badger.
Some books should be read in bed — Proust, for example, who seems to have spent most of his adult life writing in bed, and Robert Louis Stevenson’s A Child’s Garden of Verses, which was composed in bed, and which eerily lends itself to being read there, and which has probably been read aloud by supine parents to their sleepy children more than any book in our language, except the stoner classic Goodnight Moon. And some magazines, I notice, are best read in bed, for murky reasons: The New Yorker, for example, and National Geographic, maybe because they are small enough to handle easily and clean enough not to leave inky evidence in the bed, which is why we don’t read the Sunday newspaper in bed anymore, do we, having learned our lesson that time Prince Valiant’s face was discovered imprinted on the pillow, boy, was that hard to explain.
Moving on, there are the simple pleasures of reading in bed, to wit being bare of foot and sans of trousers, and there are the logistical conundra, to wit getting the book propped securely amidships and persuading the reading lamp to stop nodding sleepily (band-aids are good, although I know of people who use gum and duct tape), and there is the ancient problem of glancing at the book that your bed companion is reading and getting absorbed in it surreptitiously over her shoulder and wishing she would turn the page faster dang it and then when she gets up to check on the children, quickly snatching it and zooming through a few pages and trying desperately to remember what page she was on before she comes back to bed and gives you that look you know all too well, the look that nearly killed the refrigerator repairman that time, let’s not bring that up again.
But these are small problems with which we are all familiar, whereas there are some larger challenges, such as what if you are reading Ian Frazier and you start laughing so hard there’s an accident? and what if you are reading Ann Coulter and you lose your temper and your head flies off, would insurance pay for that? and what if you are reading something unbearably dull and you get the irrepressible urge to leap out the window and run down the street naked as Will Ferrell, will anyone visit you in jail?
In conclusion, reading is bed is a grim responsibility, I believe, and as a society we fail our children if we do not carefully remove our street clothes, don cotton pajamas of any hue, and crawl into the boat of the bed with a sigh of delight, each and every night, there to voyage into the glory of story, UnKindled, BlackBerryless, PalmPilotless, with our spectacles sliding ever so gently down our probiscii, our minds opening gently like steamer clams, hoping against hope that the Companion will brush her teeth for a really long time tonight so we can bump off the rest of her chapter, while trying to remember, with what is left of the soft ice cream of our minds, that she was on page ninety. We hope.
Your Life List: or, What to Read When
Age one: Pat the Bunny. Arguably the most intimate reading experience of your lifetime. Read it every night with your parents. Where’s the bunny? There’s the bunny!
Age two: reread Pat the Bunny. Try not to eat the pages this time. Write a paper of no fewer than three pages (single-spaced) on either of these themes: (a) the whole peek-a-boo blanket thing — does Homeland Security know? (b) putting your finger through Mommy’s wedding ring, is that an insidious form of heterosexual fascism or a devious placement ad by the bridal industry or what?
Age three: read Goodnight Moon while listening to the collected work of Courtney Love on your headphones. Will your head explode? Why or why not?
Age four: you want to ease up a little this year, go on cruise control. Ronald Reagan’s letters, the speeches of Marcel Marceau, the list of Elizabeth Taylor’s husbands, that sort of thing.
Ages five to nine: free read. Read anything you can reach — comic books, photo books, maps, wanted posters at the post office, sports books, seismographs, the Bible in Hebrew, whatever.
Ages ten and eleven: the whole Harry Potter saga, beginning with The Seven Major Works and including The Three Lesser Tomes. Write an essay exploring this question: why is it that everyone moos happily that Joanne Rowling has sparked millions of people young and old around the world to read, and people have sprinted to bookstores to buy millions of her riveting books, and her books are so thrilling and deft that a series of films has been spawned from them, but no one ever calls Joanne
Rowling of Gloucestershire one of the Great Writers of Our Time? Why is that?
Age twelve: The Lord of the Rings, beginning with The Hobbit. Do not go on to read The Silmarillion and the other ten thousand mythopoetic explorations of Tolkien’s world or you will end up stark muttering insane and governor of New Jersey.
Age thirteen: The Catcher in the Rye. Try not to spend the rest of the year sneering like Holden Caulfield. Write a paper of no fewer than two pages on how Salinger brilliantly creates a mask of sneeringness to cover an ocean of loneliness. Question: did he totally nail adolescence or what? And what’s the deal with hiding in your house in New Hampshire for the next fifty years?
Ages fourteen to eighteen: stuff for school. Write one paper of no more than two pages explaining why Huck Finn, for all its virtues, is not the great American novel, and Twain totally punts the end by having Tom Sawyer arrive to save the day, and a second paper with the thesis that the great American novel is (choose one): Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird, Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five, Joseph Heller’s Catch-22, Ken Kesey’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow, or Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451.
Age nineteen: On the Road. Get it over with. Enjoy the exuberance and adventure and zest and these jazzy United States. Try not to notice that no one actually holds a job or pays for their own gas or treats women with the slightest respect in the book. Try not to dwell on its deep underlying sadness.
Age twenty: welcome to the big leagues. Focus this year: America. This year you can choose any two Mark Twains, John Steinbecks, Willa Cathers, Annie Dillards, Saul Bellows, Ernest Hemingways, William Faulkners, and Flannery O’Connors. By the end of the year you must also have read Cynthia Ozick’s The Shawl, Barry Lopez’s The Rediscovery of North America, Art Spiegelman’s Maus, Ian Frazier’s Great Plains, and anything by Ken Kesey published before 1986.
Age twenty-one: focus this year: Canada, our Neighbor to the North. After reading any five books by Robertson Davies, you can read anything by Margaret Atwood, Farley Mowat, Mordechai Richler, Emily Carr, and Joni Mitchell, but you may not read the lyrics of Neil Young, which will send you back to patting the bunny. I dreamed I saw the knights in armor coming, saying something about a queen, there were peasants singing and drummers drumming and the archer split the tree, God help us all.
Age twenty-two: Scotland, that moist mud puddle north of Manchester! Now that you are legally able to imbibe the whiskey of life, do so on January 25, celebrating Robbie Burns, while reading Robbie Burns aloud until the wee hours, in the company of lots of your friends. Do not eat haggis. Haggis is disgusting. Spend the rest of the year reading the greatest writer who ever wrote English, Robert Louis Stevenson: Treasure Island, Kidnapped, Jeykll and Hyde, Weir of Hermiston, Child’s Garden of Verses, The Merry Men, The Beach at Falesa, Travels with a Donkey, his letters, and every essay of his you can find. Then sigh with pleasure that he wrote in our language, and pray for his soul, dead too young.
Ages twenty-three to one hundred: read the rest of the world. Start with Giovanni de Lampedusa’s The Leopard. Write a paper of no more than one page explaining why this is the finest novel ever written, period, except maybe for The Horse’s Mouth, by Joyce Cary. Thesis: Cary and Lampedusa were the same man, invented by Graham Greene in a fever dream on Capri. Discuss.
Reading the Refrigerator
And yet another subtle literature that everyone reads and relishes and savors and snickers at are the enormous vertical pages in our kitchens, the ones nearly as tall as we are, the ones festooned with cartoons and witticisms and comic strips and photographs and essays and articles and letters and early homework misadventures of young residents of the home in which the refrigerator hums, the refrigerator being the fireplace of the 21st century, the warm glow around which everyone gathers until someone, usually the dad, barks close that door!
But we do read them, don’t we, and we pin and post messages on them, and over the years the lesser stories fall off or are removed, sometimes by mortified children and sometimes by a hungry dog, and the better stories adhere — the haunted photograph from September 11, the nephew’s wedding day, the first school photographs in which the child has made a concerted effort to stick his tongue in his nose and apparently succeeded, the hilarious clip from Dave Barry, the shivering poem from W.S. Merwin, the berry pie recipe from gramma in her handwriting that looks like it came straight from the seventeenth century, the article about the neighbor’s cat who somehow climbed into the massive electric transformer down the street and was either atomized or sent hurtling into the future, the prayer card from the funeral of the terrific priest who baptized the kids, the certificate of mastery on the accordion, the college graduation photo of the woman of the house in which she looks like she is sixteen years old and is clear proof of her Dorian Gray thing, for now, thirty years later, she looks like she is twenty; and etc.
And we read other people’s refrigerators, don’t we, pausing by them on the way to the water-closet at social engagements, and getting totally absorbed in that photo of a kid who looks weirdly like Benito Mussolini, and the essay by Elwyn Brooks White, who was maybe the greatest essayist America ever hatched, which is a remarkable thing to say, and the bachelor party photograph where one man appears to be wearing a bathtub and another man appears to be trying to grope the waitress, and the flurry of glorious cartoons by Gary Larson, and a little yellowing shrine to Calvin and Hobbes, and not one but two quotes from Mark Twain, and a photograph of a Tibetan kid with a gleaming shaved head and ancient librarian spectacles who you can’t place for a moment and then you realize it’s His Holiness the Dalai Lama before the poor guy had to flee his country which was promptly eaten by its ancient ravenous neighbor, and there’s a column by a local newspaper columnist about his father-in-law which still makes people cry years after it was published, and there’s a snippet of a Winston Churchill speech, and the ubiquitous photograph, at least in Portland and environs, of a former mayor showing his plumbing parts to a naked statue which you have to admit doesn’t look real surprised, the things that statue has seen…
Think about it a moment — if there’s a place in every house that’s devoted to stories of every shape and sort and size, that has oceans of prose and photographs, gobs of poetry and paintings, posters and prints, essays and articles, quotes and notes, yards of cards, voices from all over the universe, stories from every corner of the compass, and those stories are read and pondered by all ages and stages of readers every day, well, isn’t a refrigerator a kind of large humming book, then? With all sorts of treasures inside? And how many books have such extraordinary added value as being excellent caves for ale and ice cream? And how many books can ever be said to have also housed shoes, spectacles, snowballs, and a former sparrow, as a certain refrigerator of my personal acquaintance has?
The Beauty of the Book
By which I do not mean books that are consciously made to be Beautiful, like coffeetable books the size of dolphins, and books designed to fold open in funky avant-garde ways that make you want to hit the designer in the head with a tennis ball, but the sheer sturdy simple normal workaday loveliness of the run-of-the-mill book, which is of course not run-of-the-mill at all, what with its stitched signatures of salty grainy paper, and the satisfying shouldery heft of its covers, and its crisp engraved illustrations, and wafting redolent ink, and frontispiece and afterword, and indicia and Library of Congress Number, and the often hilariously self-absorbed biographical note about the author (posing shirtless with his two cats outside the writing shed he built himself in Montana), and the thicket of fulsome blurbs on the jacket, or even several pages of blurbs in the front, as if the reader needs to hear how great the book is from everyone except the bitter Michiko Kakutani of The New York Times before beginning to read, doesn’t a marching band of blurbs seem sort of insecure, like the publishers are reassuring themselves nervously that they’ll make enough profit to build wr
iting sheds in Montana?
And the Note on the Type (Bembo! Garamond! Caslon!), and the epigraph (seemingly always from Johnny Rotten or Gandhi, or both), and the dedication (to my fourth wife, with thanks for the best seven weeks ever), and the acknowledgements (“first appeared in Southwest Jackalope State Review, in slightly different form”), and the publisher’s logo, which looks like a deer on steroids, and the front-jacket-flap summary of the plot, usually written by a publicist who didn’t actually get around to reading the book, or an editor after a Phish concert.
So many subtle and delightful bibliopleasures: the price of the book, for example, which, on hardcover books with bright shiny jackets, is always quietly hidden in spidery type at the tip of the front-jacket-flap, as if the publisher is sort of embarrassed to charge $29.95, and what’s with the 95 cents anyway, do they think a lot of people are going to make a decision to buy because it’s not thirty dollars? Or the credits for author photographs, I read those with high glee, to see who used to be the author’s girlfriend. Or the International Standard Book Number, which it turns out was invented by the International Organization for Standardization (there’s a shadow company for the CIA if ever there was one), and haven’t you also had the urge, as I have, while standing in the shadowy far corner of a quiet bookstore on a wet afternoon, to take out your extra-fine pen, and quietly edit the last digit of a book’s International Standard Book Number, so that a customer — Michiko Kakutani, say — who buys a copy of Charles Baudelaire is officially recorded in digital history as having purchased The Wit & Wisdom of Charles Barkley? Wouldn’t that be cool?