House of Books

A little summation for National Reading Month...

I live in a house of books. They line part of almost every room. In two there are shelves ceiling to floor. This used to be called a personal library. Now it’s hoarding. 

 I don’t bother much with de-cluttering. This is the clutter of my life. The clutter that is me.

 

Over there are the very twelve deep blue volumes of the My Book House books of my childhood (the set recalled by novelist Jim Harrison, Mr. Rogers and many others.)  The cover of the first volume ("In the Nursery") is rubbed bare.  My mother read to me from this book.  There are my early crayon scrawls in the interleaves of volume 2, “Story Time.” 

There is a later paperback edition of the first book I borrowed from my hometown public library: The Spaceship Under the Apple Tree, a story with marked resemblance to E.T., the movie by Steven Spielberg, born in 1946, the same year as me.

 

And the baseball novel by John R. Tunis, The Kid Comes Back I first found in the library, an unacknowledged source for The Natural, both novel and Redford movie.

 There are several 1950s hardbacks in the Winston Science Fiction series for young readers (with the same memorable black and white illustration on the inside covers of every volume), and two of the original brown-bound Hardy Boys novels—all acquired later because I cherished them from early public library days.  I can still describe the layout of that library, and memories attached to each room. 

 

There’s a 1960s shelf, from James Baldwin to Tom Wolfe. My town had no bookstores, but mass market paperbacks spun on wire carousels at drugstores, supermarkets and news stands. In that colorful chaos were my first excited explorations. For 35 to 75 cents I found books only rumored in Catholic school, and especially books never mentioned there. Those were among the intimate building blocks of me and my expanding, deepening world—statements to myself of who I wanted to be.

My path as a writer was marked with finds among the pulp fiction carousels, of early John Updike stories, J.D. Salinger and Joseph Conrad, and one of the first books on writing itself, Writing Fiction by R.V. Casill, a legendary teacher at the Iowa Writers Workshop, where I would someday be accepted as a grad student.

These were mostly the small mass market paperbacks you could fit in a back pocket.  As such they are among the last of an endangered species driven by digital media into extinction.  

 At certain liminal moments in my life I went away into very long books I’d neglected: Melville, Dickens, Pynchon. But regardless of what I was doing in the world, each era of my inner life is witnessed on those shelves, each assimilated into my ongoing life. There's Jung and James Hillman, William Manchester and Jane Jacobs, Paul Shepard and Gary Snyder, Northrop Frye and Jim Harrison, Shakespeare and George Bernard Shaw, Wallace Stevens and W.S. Merwin, Vonnegut and Garcia Marquez, Shunryu Suzuki and Leslie Marmon Silko; H.G. Wells, Margaret Atwood, Ursula K. LeGuin, Kim Stanley Robinson. 

Many have memories, people, moods, historical moments stuck to their pages, to those very books themselves: I’m not primarily visual, but I can instantly recall book covers. They embody the past absorbed into my being, and opening those pages again releases new responses. So in that way, every book on these shelves is a new book waiting to blossom. Sometimes they represent only aspiration, but they are always a moment away from speaking in new air. 

 When one book refers to something in another, it’s a confirming delight to be able to just reach for that book. It does not require an algorithm. The physical reality of my books—including evidence of where some used ones have traveled—is vital to their value. Besides, they don’t spy on me. 

 I was not a particularly precocious reader, and often too impatient to fully inhabit my reading. But as Mailer once suggested, a book and a reader just have to be ready for each other. Some of these books are still waiting, but that can happen at any moment.

 I have avoided the vampire technology, so I’m reading with even more patience: two 600 plus page books on FDR helped me through these inconceivable days. Of course there’s lots of comfort food on these shelves as well— Joe Leaphorn and Commissario Brunetti police procedurals, Sherlock Holmes stories, Star Trek novels.

 I’ve always read for the pleasure of the words, for the music, the voice, the inspiration and excitement, the sparks that connect into the infinite. These days when I seem to retain less, that pleasure in the moment of reading remains. Here in my house of books.