by Brian Doyle
And this is not even to delve into the elegant beauties of older tomes, with their imprinted covers and gold leaf, the entwined initials of the author stamped into the cover, the deckle-edged pages and uncut pages of ancient books, the faintest of tissue sheets over the first daguerreotype, the dingbats and doohickeys, the maniacal enormous initial caps to open chapters, the tiny line sketches at the heads of chapters, the loose thread of the binding waving alluringly at the bottom of the spine, what child has not had the overpowering urge to yank that thread, on the off chance that the book would fall apart so fast that there would be piles of words on the floor?
In short, of the savoring of books there is no end, to paraphrase the famous Israeli poet Ecclesiastes, and while we rightly spend most of our time bookwise absorbed by the content therein, we should occasionally pause and salute the package in which prose has been poured. The book is, after all, among the most successful and enduring technologies ever hatched by the mind of man — a sentence that may or may not ever be written about your cool plastic thing with a thousand electric books inside it.
On the Habit of Reading
The thing is, I’d love to move up the ladder to Jorge Luis Borges, to Søren Kierkegaard, to Jose Saramago, but I am constantly distracted by the quirky — the Evelyn Waughs, the Flannery O’Connors, the Ian Fraziers. I set out to read Edward Gibbon and end up reading Edward Abbey. I set out to read Jane Austen and end up reading Paul Auster. I set out to read Thomas Hardy and end up reading the Hardy Boys.
I don’t know how this happens.
I make my plans and procure my books and lay them in careful piles by my reading chair, and then I find myself supine on the floor reading an Ian Fleming novel (Goldfinger, most recently; one of the best) or the collected works of Saki or the spare prose of Mary Frances Kennedy Fisher, or all the books by Jim Kjelgaard that feature dogs, which it turns out there are a heck of a lot of those, and what books of his that are not about dogs are about otters and beavers and such, it makes you wonder. Or when I set sail toward a breezy read, purposely aiming for operetta rather than Sturm und Drang, I suddenly find myself by accident touring the Highlands of Scotland with Samuel Johnson, L.L.D., of London, and his account of the journey leads to me his companion’s utterly different account of the same journey, Boswell’s Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides, and that leads me back to a fine John McPhee book about the Hebrides, The Crofter and the Laird, and McPhee’s ineffable eye for the natural world leads me to Edward Hoagland, whose eye is even sharper, and the crusty Hoagland’s essays on the woods of New England lead me to the cheerful Robert Michael Pyle’s essays on the woods of the Pacific Northwest, and in reaction to all that water I turn to the desert, where the Desert Fathers lead me to Thomas Aquinas who leads me to Thomas Merton whose Anglophilia leads me to books about London, among which I discover James Boswell’s diaries of his London journeys, and so come full circle, moaning gently.
I don’t know how this happens.
Also I get sidetracked by other people’s books, which are sort of like other people’s meals in a restaurant, you know how whatever she ordered always looks better than what you ordered, and what you really want to do is just quietly switch plates when she’s not looking, and blame it on the waiter, but you can’t really do that, or do it more than once per restaurant, but you can do that with books, although it turns out people hate when you purloin their books, but one thing I have learned as the father of three kids is that you can do that to kids from sheer heft and paternal authority, or in an emergency by using the old I paid for that book! hammer, and so in this way I have read Carl Hiassen and Cornelia Funke and Blue Bailett and Lemony Snicket and of course the glorious herculean labors of J.K. Rowling, who, you know, everyone talks about how many copies of her books have been sold, but you never hear anyone say what a terrific writer she is, which is certainly the case, I mean, those books will be in print for centuries, and I was so impressed by her classics that I reread Tolkien and C.S. Lewis, and discovered Philip Pullman, and…
I don’t know how this happens.
Then there are the books you always were supposed to have read but never actually did read, or lied about reading for papers and such in college, like Katherine Anne Porter and Edmund Spenser and all, but who really ever read all of the Fairie Queen except on a bet or having taken too much medicine, although I did recently while horrendously sick with the flu sentence myself to reading Marcel Proust, who was so egregiously boring that I could only recover with a steady diet of Silver Surfer comics and a stack of New Yorker magazines bigger than my head, which after I finished 28 consecutive copies of The New Yorker I had an irresistible urge to wear black and buy an island off the coast of South Carolina for some reason.
I don’t know how this happens.
And then, if you are like me, when you are standing politely near someone else’s bookshelf, pretending to be interested in politics or religion or the many fine distinctions among possible kitchen floor tiles, you not only thoroughly peruse their entire collection, wondering why anyone would bind issues of Popular Mechanics and if there’s anyone else in the universe who still has books by Alexander Woolcott, and you have the awful urge to just quietly pocket that copy of J.M. Coetzee or Richard Farina or Joyce Cary that you have been looking for since the dawn of recorded time, but mostly you don’t.
I don’t know how this happens.
“My reading has been lamentably desultory and immethodical,” says the odd and colorful essayist Charles Lamb, and I know whereof he writes, for I am the king of the immethodical readers, which habit has led to, among other things, Charles Lamb, who led me to Thomas Macaulay, who led me to Thomas Carlyle, whom I discover wrote of Lamb that “a more pitiful, ricketty, gasping, staggering, stammering Tom-fool I do not know…he is a confirmed, shameless drunkard, tipples till he is utterly mad, and is only not thrown out of doors because he is too much despised for taking [the] trouble,” which led me for some reason to reading writers who were also legendary tipplers, like Faulkner and Kerouac and the Raymonds Carver and Chandler, and…
I don’t know how this happens.
And also I go on reading jags that start in libraries and bookstores, where you can wander around running your fingers over endless colorful spines of books, and here and there tease one away from the walls of its fellows, and balance it in your hand, and gaze happily at the lurid cover, and read the breathless first page, and how very many times it has happened to all of us that pawing curiously at a book in the library or bookstore had led straight to work of savor and salt that has really mattered in your life — in my case the odd brilliant travel writings of Robert Gibbings, and James Salter’s books on flying, and Mary Lee Settle’s graceful books, and the collected works of Charles Nordhoff and James Norman Hall, none of which I never would have read if I didn’t fingerwander, and…
The fact is that people who adhere to reading agendas, or grace monthly book clubs, or diligently set to reading the works of Jane Austen in order, or read only new novels by women, or only histories of imperial wars, or only the million novels by such graphomaniacs as P.G. Wodehouse and Agatha Christie, well, they awe and amaze me, for my reading lurches hilariously like a drunken sailor, and I sometimes look back on recent reading adventures with amazement, and wonder if those writers who spoke back to back to me have ever even been in the same sentence before: the sweaty Edgar Rice Burroughs and the elegant Pico Iyer, the dusty Homer Davenport and the urbane urban A.J. Liebling, the tall-tale-teller Mark Twain and the meticulous engineer Henry Petroski, who wrote a totally riveting book about pencils, you wouldn’t think you could write a great book about pencils but you would be wrong, and his pencils reminds me of a book about railroad maps I just read, which was genius, and the word genius reminds me inevitably of Robert Louis Stevenson, whose Kidnapped I just reread, and I swear it was even better than it was when I read it at age twelve, and that Scottishness of that novel set me to reading old Walter Scott, and…
Sme
lliterature
News item floating under the old proboscis this morning: the American Chemical Society announces a new “sniff test” whereby the slow death of old books can be accurately measured by analysis of aroma; it turns out that the musty murky bookish smell we all know is composed of hundreds of organic compounds being released, in fairly strict chronological order, by the pages and binding. “A combination of grassy notes with a tang of acids and a hint of vanilla over an underlying mustiness,” says the Society’s report, sounding entertainingly like a wine doofus, before noting that papers containing pine tar and wood fiber are the first to give up the ghost (or gas).
And away sprints my mind, pondering favorite books and their smells, and the adventures evoked by their smells, and the way some books smell like their stories — Tom Sawyer smells like summer, doesn’t it? And Ray Bradbury’s Dandelion Wine, the greatest of all American novels about summer, doesn’t that smell like fresh-mown grass and someone frying catfish three houses down? And War and Peace, doesn’t that smell like a vast forbidding winter, bracing and bitter? And Joyce Cary’s masterpiece The Horse’s Mouth, doesn’t that smell like London must have smelled between the world wars, fish heads and apple peels and coal smoke and sour ale and a dying empire?
I peel Tim Winton’s glorious Cloudstreet off the shelf and crack it open and out comes the most redolent sea breeze from the shore of Western Australia; I open the poems of William Stanley Merwin of the Island of Maui, and out wriggle the sensual allures of mango and guava and koa; I pick up the wonderful essayist Elwyn Brooks White, and faintly I smell the kelp and workboats and henhouses of his rock-ribbed farm on the coast of Maine…
It’s startling, really, the sensory load that books carry. Not all of them, certainly, especially now, when so many new books smell only of money or the itch for it, or of political rage, which smells like frustration, or fear, or a desperate thirst for attention — but many, maybe even most; and this is not only the province of fiction. Edward Hoagland’s journals of wandering the moist jungles of northern British Columbia reek of spruce and smoke, Twain’s Life on the Mississippi of mud and cigars, Mary Oliver’s poems of seawrack and scrub pine, Eudora Welty’s of shimmering heat and the faint metallic scent of bourbon. Travel writing at its best, of course, is crammed with scent; to read Jan Morris on Hong Kong is to hold a book alive with smell and sound and music and wrangle and burble and the endless howling of car horns, and to read Redmond O’Hanlon’s Trawler is to smell every kind of awful icy wet weather and dismembered enormous North Sea fish, not to mention the fried candy bars the crew gobbles at every opportunity.
Odd, isn’t it, that mere ink on the page, alphabetical parades and processions, stacked in lines and bound with glue, could elicit such a sensory response in the reader, far more than merely the scent-trails of paper and glue changing into gasses, ever so slowly; but that is perhaps the deepest pleasure of all, book-wise, that by diving into the story we change planes, worlds, bodies, time zones, centuries, and without warning we are plunged wholly in another world — plunged so thoroughly that sometimes, wonderfully, thrillingly, we emerge, unsure for a moment where exactly we are. Every reader has had that experience as a child, and loved it, and misses it; but another of the many glories of books is that you can have that extraordinary experience again, today, simply by opening the right book. And there are, as we know with immense joy, so very many of those…
A Note on Surreptitiously Reading Other People’s Bookshelves
Which you might as well admit right now you have done at least fifty times, and you know exactly what I mean, at parties of every shape and stripe you, yes you, have tiptoed gently out of the social ramble and eased infinitesimally into the den or library or living room and happily spent the rest of the party checking out the books, until your paramour tracked you down and sighed, and you drove home silently, your paramour thinking, not for the first time, what an utter doofus you are, and you thinking that you might well have quietly borrowed that lovely old hardback copy of Steinbeck’s Sweet Thursday without anyone the wiser.
If we are really being honest this morning we would admit that not only do we abrogate our social responsibility when we read other people’s bookshelves, the glue of society being chatter and natter, but that we actually do make totally unfair moral judgments about character and taste based on book collections, which we should not do, however tempting it is to think of someone with all of Dan Brown or Jerzy Kosinski as a roaring criminal, and someone with all of Mark Twain or Annie Dillard as a dear friend you do not yet know, despite the fact that Twain committed the sin of Tom Sawyer Abroad, and Annie Dillard, bless her large heart, published The Writing Life, which even she calls embarrassing.
When I was courting the woman who would later be my wife, she had four books on the bookshelf above her bed, in a tiny apartment near an ocean, and reading her shelves, brief an experience as it was, was a revelatory pleasure: The Horse’s Mouth by Joyce Cary, The River Why by David James Duncan, The Captain’s Verses by Pablo Neruda, and The Song of the Lark by Willa Cather — in other words, three terrific books out of four, the Cather being awful. But still, it seemed to me, it was a very impressive batting average; and then my fate was sealed when I asked, not at all innocently, what her favorite book was, and she said To Kill a Mockingbird, and now we have three children.
Anyway, after many years of reading people’s shelves I recognize the signs of it in other people, and it is a dark and devious pleasure to be at a party and notice two or three innocents sliding toward the shelves, and to recognize the way people cock their heads sideways when they are scanning shelves, and to snort with laughter at the way a guy will be nodding in agreement at someone’s vehement assertion that Scott Spencer’s Endless Love is the worst book ever written in the history of the world, and suddenly he, the nodding guy, reaches down and pulls out a Walter Mosley novel and says something like hey! Walter Mosley! which earns him a glare from his paramour or the host or both, and he has to spend the rest of the party talking about Greg Oden’s unfortunate mohawk haircut while I have the stacks blissfully to myself.
Yet there is much to be learned from scanning strange shelves. The alphabetized collection — is that a sign of an orderly mind or of squirming mania? Books arranged by color and/or by height, what does that mean? No books at all anywhere in a house, what does that mean? Books packed so tightly on their shelves that you cannot pry one away from its fellows at all one bit, does that mean no one ever pulls a book out? And what does it mean when you pull out, say, a V.S. Naipaul novel from someone’s stacks, and find LAKE OSWEGO LIBRARY stamped on the pages? Or when you find a book that you loaned the host and you discover he crossed your name out and wrote his own on the flyleaf? Should you just quietly slip it back onto the shelf and amble back toward the onion dip, or should you call Homeland Security?
I remember one house where all the books were novels by women written in the last twenty years, which nags me still, what did that say of the host? And another host who had every single book ever written by P.G. Wodehouse, which is a scary number. And another house which had a remarkable and lovely and comprehensive collection of books, all shelved willy-nilly, Edward Gibbon next to Edward Jones, Ellen Glasgow next to Ellen Gilchrist, Ian McEwan next to Ian Frazier, but over all the shelves a thick dust — not one of those books had been rescued for years. I left that house saddened, and sneezing.
I have even, I confess, wandered strange houses and poked into their bedrooms and clapped eyes on what books were by the beds, even venturing a guess as to who slept on which side by which books were stacked where, and I have spent time in strange bathrooms riffling through the books and magazines people keep there, and in every hotel and motel room I have ever been imprisoned in I have happily pored over the Gideon Bible or the Book of Mormon (“chloroform in print,” as Twain called it), and I am so addled by bibliocuriosity that I have spent hours reading the shelves in the offices of doctors of the body, the mind, and the soul, e
ven once choosing a doctor because he had a Robert Louis Stevenson book on his shelves, although it was Catriona, the mediocre sequel to Stevenson’s masterpiece Kidnapped.
In short we all scan other people’s shelves, and make unreasonable judgments, and we should cease doing so, because the very fact that people have books in their houses is a good thing, all things considered, and we should salute and celebrate that urge, and not care so much what books are there or not there, and if you would do your best to stop reading other people’s shelves, I personally would be grateful, because that leaves a little more room for me to poke around. More onion dip?
Summer Reading: a Note
I’ll bet you a cheap paperback edition of Robert Louis Stevenson’s classic novel Treasure Island that (a) you’ve never actually read it, or (b) you haven’t read it since you were twelve years old.
The same goes for Stevenson’s terrific novel Kidnapped, and Kenneth Grahame’s The Wind in the Willows, and Madeleine L’Engle’s A Wrinkle in Time, and Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Tom Sawyer — all books you read one summer long ago, right? Or maybe you were going to read them but never actually technically did — you had a copy in the house but there was always a game to play or a chore to do, and, well, now you’ve seen the movie, or your children read it last summer, or you bought lovely edition recently for your grandchildren but didn’t shortstop the gift before handing it over…
Here’s an idea — read them this summer. They’re better than you remember, if you read them before — and if you never read them at all, you’ll find them delicious, deft, and delightful. And summer is a perfect time to read them. Instead of gagging on bad loud greedy television, bad loud movies with lots of explosions and unsubtle ads for toys, and bad books by fourth-rate movie stars and fifth-rate spy-masters, why not hit the beach with a good book?