Tag Archives: Books

They Asked If It’s Okay To Buy More Books

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“Bibliophile” sounds better than “bookworm”, although it might be better to be one of the latter, not the former.

According to Merriam-Webster, a bibliophile is a lover or collector of books, while a bookworm is someone “unusually devoted to reading and study”. Those definitions suggest that a bookworm spends time in books — using them as tools for a greater purpose — while a bibliophile spends time on books — admiring or acquiring them without necessarily getting inside them.

Being a bibliophile tends to generate two questions. The first is asked by other people: “Have you read all these books?” This question has a simple answer, which should be obvious, even to people who don’t own many books.

The second is asked by oneself: “What am I doing with all these books?” This question comes in may flavors, like “Why do I have all these books?” and “Shouldn’t I get rid of some of these books?”, and no simple answer at all. 

This brings me to something from a site called HMM Weekly. They offer a series called “Ask the Sophist”. Here’s how they describe it:

THE SOPHIST is here to tell you why you’re right. Send your questions to AskTheSophist@hmmweekly.com, and get the answers you want.

The particular question I saw is a good one (that’s my opinion, for personal reasons):

Dear The Sophist,
I own a lot of books, and nearly enough shelves to fit them. I haven’t read most of them—has anyone with a lot of books read most of them?—yet I still get impulses to buy more. Can you please tell me why it’s OK for me to buy more books?

The Sophist replied (in part):

Dear Volume Purchaser,
Books are ridiculous objects to buy, aren’t they? For the sake of spending a day or two, maybe a week, with some author’s thoughts and words, you take custody of this physical item that sticks around, and around, as more and more others accumulate along with it. You look at them, almost unseeingly, day after day; the walls of your rooms press in; you pay extra money to the movers to drag the extra weight around from one dwelling to the next, all because you read an interesting review once or a cover caught your eye in a bookstore.  

You know what else is ridiculous? The sheer impermanence of thought. The constant yet ephemeral flickering of partial understanding across the synapses in our wet and mortal brains, and the dry circuits of the junky and even more short-lived electronic ersatz brains we rely on for backup. A book is an investment against forgetting and death—a poor investment, but it beats the alternatives. It is a slippery yet real toehold on eternity. 

Long after your question and my answer here will have been chopped to incompatible bits and decayed to a 404, the physical books will endure. I consult my nearest set of Ikea bookcases—many of their shelves double-stacked, some with books laid sideways, and with copies of Daniel Pinkwater’s Borgel, the first Dragonball trilogy, two Far Side collections, Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities, and sundry other volumes spilled or scattered on the floor at their feet. . . . 

From the shelves proper, searching for something old-looking, I retrieve a copy of Brave Men—”The New Book by ERNIE PYLE,” per the front of the dust jacket; “Now in its 700th thousand, including the Book-of-the-Month Club,” per the rear. It is printed in double columns for economy, under wartime paper rationing. The inside front cover bears a slightly double-struck stamp reading “NAOMI GIESER / 2400 McELDERRY ST.” and on the endpaper opposite is handwritten, in ungraceful cursive, “Ernie Pyle killed in action in Pacific April 1945.” I have read this book, and I would guess so did Naomi Gieser of McElderry St. The internet tells me she was around age 20 at the time, and by the obituaries she was evidently still alive when the book made it to me.

Two shelves down is The Legend of Zelda: Majora’s Mask / A Link to the Past: Legendary Edition, displayed in a place of honor. I have not read this book, but its owner has. On the shelf in between is a three-volume set of Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, a richly decorated 1946 edition from The Heritage Press. . . .  There are two strips of torn-off blue-lined memo-pad paper tucked in it, one shortly after the beginning of the text proper, the other up at page 446, “Italy Under Maximian and Severus.” The latter, I think, marks my own deepest run into Gibbon, sometime in the 1990s. But I can get back to it right now and keep going, just as soon as I finish with—what was the question again?

Oh, yes, right. The books. Some of these books will surely outlast their easy-build Swedish bookshelves, which only have so many future moves in them. They have outlasted other readers and non-readers, and they will outlast me. And, sure, I will die without having read many of them, though it would be rude to write down which ones I consider myself the likeliest to miss. As long as they are there, there is the chance. 

My father subscribed to the Library of America for a while, and among the many shelves of books in our home, he left one entire bookcase filled with the results, soundly printed on acid-free paper for posterity. I have no real idea what fraction of them he read; he was a devoted and wide-ranging reader, but not the sort of fanatic or obsessive who would have plowed through them all to prove a point. I carry some off with me now and then, in a tiny contribution to my mother’s decluttering. Before the pandemic I helped myself to his copy of the volume of Four Novels of the 1960s by Philip K. Dick, and I used it to finally educate myself on Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? Had he read it, too? If not, then I took care of reading it for both of us.  

If you stop the flow of new books, you stop this flow of possibilities. Still, . . . you sense that your household arrangements are a little out of balance. You have nearly enough shelves, you say, by which you mean that the books are creeping out into your living space. 

Given that, [you could] cull the truly hopeless or pointless part of your inventory . . .  The Sophist has done this, in the course of moving into smaller living spaces with increasing numbers of people. I’ve only regretted not having one of the castoffs once or twice. (More than zero times, though!) 

And then you may buy more books, with a clearer conscience, and carry on as a custodian of knowledge. You might also consider buying some more bookshelves. 

“The revolt of Maxentius immediately restored peace to the churches of Italy and Africa…”, The Sophist 

Well, that helped. 

So the question before the house is: What about The Hidden Springs: A Journey to the Source of Consciousness, by Mark Solms, “a revelatory new theory of consciousness that returns emotions to the center of mental life” (Norton, 432 pages)?

It’s true, there’s always Kindle. If only Bezos treated his workers better.

Want to Read Something Really Depressing About America?

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Journalist George Packer’s new book, The Unwinding: An Inner History of the New America, has been compared to the U.S.A. Trilogy, the novels in which John Dos Passos used experimental techniques to capture the state of our union in the early 20th century. Except that The Unwinding is nonfiction.

To quote the publisher:

American democracy is beset by a sense of crisis. Seismic shifts during a single generation have created a country of winners and losers, allowing unprecedented freedom while rending the social contract, driving the political system to the verge of breakdown … (Packer) journeys through the lives of several Americans, (interweaving) these intimate stories with biographical sketches of the era’s leading public figures … and collages made from newspaper headlines, advertising slogans, and song lyrics….The Unwinding portrays a superpower in danger of coming apart at the seams, its elites no longer elite, its institutions no longer working, its ordinary people left to improvise their own schemes for success and salvation.

Packer summarizes his view of the past 30 years in the newspaper column below: “Decline and Fall: How American Society Unravelled”. He doesn’t meet Marx’s challenge in these few paragraphs to change the world (not merely understand it): such as explaining how to get more people to vote intelligently, how to overcome the power of money in our democracy, how to avoid a race to the economic bottom in a global economy. But maybe more of us need to clearly understand what’s happened before we can do something about it.

(Or should we simply get out of the way, relying on our children and their children to do what needs to be done? Like the man said: “Your old road is rapidly agin’, please get out of the new one if you can’t lend your hand, for the times they are a-changin’ .”)

When we talk about America’s decline, it’s tempting to wonder if the situation is as bad as it seems. Packer’s book and the column below are honorable attempts to counter that temptation.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/jun/19/decline-fall-american-society-unravelled

An Ingenious Device for Avoiding Thought

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The principal speaker at our son’s graduation yesterday was Vermont novelist Chris Bohjalian. He was excellent. He got a deserved standing ovation. Aside from advising the graduates to “stay here!” (that was a joke, but not a completely bad piece of advice), he argued for, among other things, the importance of reading.

As a reader, I didn’t disagree with what he said. Not everyone, however, is of the same opinion.

It’s always bothered me that I’d often finish a book and shortly thereafter not remember much about it. So when I retired a few years ago, I started writing a brief response to every book I finished on a blog I called Retirement Reading. Now I had a semi-permanent record of the books I was reading.

Keeping a record of what I’d read reminded me of a summer long ago when I kept a list of books I’d finished in order to win a prize or something. (Several of the terrific Doctor Doolittle and Wizard of Oz  books appeared on my list that summer.)

Last week, I decided to move the contents of Retirement Reading over here to WordPress (goodbye, Google). Trying to think of a good title (since it’s never been a blog about Medicare or where to retire), I looked through some quotations regarding books and reading. Some famous authors had some surprising things to say on the topic:

“Reading, after a certain age, diverts the mind too much from its creative pursuits. Any man who reads too much and uses his own brain too little falls into lazy habits of thinking.” — Albert Einstein

“Books are good enough in their own way, but they are a mighty bloodless substitute for life.” — Robert Louis Stevenson

“Learn as much by writing as by reading.” — Lord Acton

“Reading is sometimes an ingenious device for avoiding thought.” — Sir Arthur Helps (who? — 19th century author, politician, etc.)

They weren’t all negative, of course:

“The love of learning, the sequestered nooks, and all the sweet serenity of books.” — Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Sir Arthur won:

http://ingeniousdevice.wordpress.com/

Books: A Memoir by Larry McMurtry

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Larry McMurtry has written at least 40 books, mostly novels, but he apparently prefers reading, buying and selling books more than writing them. While writing all of those books and reading many more, he became an antiquarian or secondhand bookseller. He currently operates a giant bookstore in Archer City, Texas, that holds roughly 300,000 volumes.

There is apparently a difference between running a used or secondhand bookstore and running an antiquarian one. At one point, McMurtry refers to a “low-end” book as one costing less than $500. He is primarily interested in locating (“scouting”), buying and selling the ones that aren’t low-end (e.g. $50,000 for a first edition of The Seven Pillars of Wisdom).

Books tells the story of McMurtry’s life with books (and magazines too). But it is a strangely written book. 

The chapters are almost all one or two pages long. He rambles. He frequently refers to buying this or that book from this or that bookseller while occasionally noting that not many people will want to read a book about buying books: “I’m aware that this kind of prattle is exactly the kind of prattle I ought to be avoiding, lest this become a narrative that is of interest only to bookmen”. 

And 50 pages later: “Here I am, thirty-four chapters into a book that I hope will interest the general or common reader — and yet why should these readers be interested in the the fact that in 1958 or so I paid Ted Brown $7.50 for a nice copy of The Anatomy of Melancholy?”

I kept reading, because he is such a good writer and there are enough interesting stories and observations in the book to make it worthwhile. 

This is my favorite anecdote. McMurtry came upon an English edition of Moby Dick that had belonged to an English author named Charles Reade. Mr. Reade once had an assignment to edit Moby Dick for English readers, making it shorter and easier to sell. The copy that McMurtry found had proposed edits written in it: “Charles Reade was not a man to be intimidated by a mere American classic. He began his editorial work by drawing a bold line through ‘Call me Ishmael'”.

Aside from so many references to books and authors I’ve never heard of, the most striking thing in Books is its account of McMurtry’s amazing productivity. He casually mentions that he has read a certain 12-volume set of diaries several times, in addition to reading apparently vast numbers of other books, many more than once. He did this while writing his own 50 or so books and screenplays. While traveling around the country looking for books to buy and owning and operating his own store.

It’s true that he has had a partner in the book business. But I don’t understand how one person could do all of this. It’s like a story from another age. Maybe he skips a lot of pages when he reads? And never sleeps or takes a shower?  (7/28/12)

Books for Sale

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Larry McMurtry is still selling books down in Texas. According to this recent announcement, he might be selling hundreds of thousands of them. If you scroll down a bit, he explains why:

http://www.bookedupac.com/id12.html