Stephen King to Don Delillo, Annie Proulx to Annie Dillard

The Pleasure and Pain of Owning Books

By Allen Jones, 4-29-06

"My books (which do not know that I exist)
Are as much a part of me as this visage
With its gray hair at the temples and gray eyes
That I look for vainly in glass surfaces
And wonderingly run my curved hand over.
And not without some logical bitterness
It occurs to me that the essential words
That most express me are not in my own writings
But in those books that don't know who I am.
Better that way. The voices of the dead
Will utter me forever."
--Jorge Luis Borges


There should be a word for that particular kind of stress associated with moving. Some -itis or -enia or -obia. Packing up cardboard boxes full of your random shit and displacing it across the state, one rental to another. The last few days, having U-Hauled myself from Livingston to Helena, I've been unpacking my books. Puzzled by the new surroundings, my dog can't stop shadowing me room to room, nosing at my hip as I sit alphabetizing titles. Now and then I'll show him a spine. "Dostoyevsky. That's a pretty good one." If moving is an illness, moving paperbacks must be a kind of cancer. Merck Manual symptomology includes sore lower back and melancholia, bleary-eyes and red wine hangovers. Patient complains of angst and anomie. The doctor behind his clipboard raises a surprised eyebrow. "So you're a reader?" Indeed, and brother, we're a dying breed. Another generation or two, me and thee will have gone the way of the dodo. They'll be putting us in museums.

What I'm concerned about now, however (two glasses into a bottle of seven dollar merlot) is, for god's sake, why? Why do I have all these goddamned books? Why does anybody? They're expensive, they weigh you down, they're cumbersome. Writing them, reading them, treasuring them. This day and age, it feels antiquated. Quaint. Especially now, with all the information in the world a click and a digital beep-boop-bop away, why all these ponderous rows of bound paper? What's the illness, and what's the cure?

I should start with sentimentality. I've had some of these books as long as I've had my birthmarks. They're a part of me, and I couldn't bear to part with them. A tattered row of paperbacks that, collectively, first made me want to become a writer. Maybe they will again. Slipping them back into their new slots, I keep looking for some slight residue of magic. In second grade I discovered Louis L'amour, and I still have The First Fast Draw. I cannot begin to describe the fantastic thrill I felt as I first watched the hero (his name is irrelevant, all L'amour's heroes are interchangeable) file the metal tang off his pistol barrel on his way to becoming the world's first pistolero. "Try to steal my woman will you." Next to the westerns there's a row of fantasy novels, Le Guin to Tolkien, and further down, a predictable line of Stephen Kings. Dragons to demons, these are books of utter imagination, pure sorcery. Anything – absolutely anything – could happen. Good guys are good and bad guys are bad and everybody gets what they deserve. For a bookish, nine or ten year old boy, there is no notion more satisfying than the thought that there is indeed justice in the world and that you, naturally (as the unavoidable hero of your own ongoing narrative), might be just the guy to mete it out.

After sentimentality, there's utility. There are books that serve a real purpose. Despite their heft, these are the books I don't mind moving at all. My Webster's Dictionary, 10th Edition, for instance. I've never been sure why more people don't read dictionaries for fun. All these unfamiliar words. All these tiny little doors opened into previously unimagined possibilities. Another word for navel, for instance, is omphalos. Who'd have guessed? It's circled in red ink. And to defenestrate (circled in blue) is to throw out the window. Apophasis is an allusion to something by denying its mention. "Don't even talk to me about my last job." Shelved next to my dictionary is my Shakespeare, also good for browsing, especially if your professional ego's feeling slightly inflated, if you've been a little high on your own horse. You think you know how to write? Hah! Try reading Hamlet again, buster. It's always kind of tickled me that the best writing in the English language fits under one cover, one name. Next to Shakespeare, the Cambridge Guide to Literature in English (too academic for my tastes, but still useful) and then the unavoidable thesaurus which honestly, I haven't used in years, eons, ages, generations, a coon's age.

Similarly useful, albeit in not such a Calvinist, baldly utilitarian sense, are the artful novels, the influences, the books I can't stop reading. There are pages of my Vintage Paperback edition of Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian, for instance, that I've read forty or fifty times. Such an extraordinary accomplishment, that book. "And so these parties divided upon that midnight plain, each passing back the way the other had come, pursuing as all travelers must inversions without end upon other men's journeys." Michael Ondaatje occasionally hits the same resonances (prosody married to profundity) and James Salter is a master at Hemingway-esque compression and oblique suggestion. His short stories are models of the form. Paul Auster and Cynthia Ozick and Tom McGuane. Joan Didion and Kafka and Annie Dillard. Every writer has his or her deities. It's a shameful secret of the trade that every full sentence you put down has already been influenced a hundred different ways, cobbled together out of a mishmash of other books and authorial voices, a hobo's stewpot of roiling melancholy and mawkishness, sentence structure and cynicism. I could no more give up these books than I could give up both kidneys.

Then there are the books that I haven't read but should. You keep thinking, next weekend. Procrastination, it seems, is its own art form. Most of these books I've bought out of a vague notion of self-improvement. More in the Stephen Hawking sense than the Dr. Phil sense. Writers should know a little bit about everything, right? I've always been weak in the sciences. Ergo, here comes a history of light. Next to it, a history of DNA. Further down the row, books of anthropology and ecology, something about fossil hunting; another one about the NSA and eavesdropping.

Sentimentality, utility, procrastination. Then there's simple ego. I have shelves full of my own titles, multiple copies and editions. My novel, Last Year's River, in hardcover and paperback. One of these days, by god, I'll publish another one. Both editions of my treatise on the ethics of hunting, A Quiet Place of Violence. People still seem to dig it, and somebody should probably reissue it in paperback. Rows of the books I've edited over the years. The Big Sky Reader; The Best of Big Sky Journal Fly-Fishing, The Best of Montana's Short Fiction (hardcover and paperback). It's a kind of exhibitionism, I suppose. Here's my ego on display. Really, I should probably box them away. Maybe tomorrow.

On the shelf above my own books are the titles and editions that will, or should, survive me. As painful as it is to imagine, if I got hit by a bus tomorrow, most of these treasured pieces of my personality would be tossed out with the wooden tennis rackets. (Does anyone else really need a paperback edition of The Two Towers with the cover missing?) I'm too penurious to be a true collector. If given a choice between a new hardcover for twenty-five dollars and a used paperback for twenty-five cents, there is no choice. I'm interested less in the physical artifact of the book than I am in the content. Nevertheless, over the years I've picked up a handful of gems that might eventually make their way onto E-Bay. Signed firsts of Rick Bass's The Watch (still the best thing he's ever written), Annie Proulx's Close Range and Ivan Doig's This House of Sky. Others, less valuable but just as meaningful. A tattered hardcover of Robert Frost's collected poems that has made its way down to me through the family ladder. A hardcover, late edition of Hemingway's short stories. Then there are the breakup books, those titles that came my way via old girlfriends. In the getting to know you stage, you always pass along movies, music and books. "You've just got to read this." Then after the inevitable bad scene of tears and accusations, the strongest reminders of the good times are the titles. At least I got Pam Houston out of the deal.

At the end of the day, and despite my own self-recriminations (all this money, all this effort, and to what end?), perhaps a personal library needs no justification. What's the alternative, after all? Outside these book lined walls, there's nothing but confusion. The culture at large has set itself directly against the slow, contemplative rigors and pleasures of reading. The self-involved cynicism of a David Spade and the cocky self-righteousness of a Dick Cheney. We're still running out of oil and the ice caps are still melting, carbon in the atmosphere and a moron in the whitehouse. I've got my Shakespeare and Dostoyevsky, and so, at least for the moment, can ignore the fact that there are those in the world so obtuse as to actually stop and think about Pat Robertson. The FCC and the pope are tramping up and down in quaint little footraces of irrelevancy, arbiters of profanity and birth control; meanwhile, there's still AIDS and SARS and bird flu and Ron Jeremy peddling penis enlargements on late night television. The world keeps spinning like a top, denying entropy and inertia to, yes, pick up speed. It's only a matter of time until we hit terminal velocity, until we are each and all flung out to the void like toddlers off a Satanic, high-geared carousel.

Finally, I have to agree with Don Delillo, that writing (and, by extension, reading) is a form of personal freedom. "It frees us from the mass identity we see in the making all around us. In the end, writers will write not to be outlaw heroes of some underculture but mainly to save themselves, to survive as individuals." I have to give credence to the words of C.S. Lewis who wrote that literature is a series of windows, even of doors. "Good reading can be described either as an enlargement or as a temporary annihilation of the self. But that is an old paradox; ‘he that loseth his life shall save it.' We therefore delight to enter into other men's beliefs....even though we think them untrue. And into their passions, though we think them depraved...Literary experience heals the wound, without undermining the privilege, of individuality...In reading great literature I become a thousand men and yet remain myself...Here, as in worship, in love, in moral action, and in knowing, I transcend myself, and am never more myself than when I do."

It seems that we should treasure our books if only because the alternative – a life in modernity without the possibility of escape, without reading – is too bleak to contemplate.

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