A Life Built Around Reading

Phantoms on the Bookshelves is the title of Jacques Bonnet’s homage to the books that fill the bookshelves in his apartment, almost 40,000 volumes according to his estimate. He is not a book collector in the sense of stashing away prized volumes, but rather a serious reader, almost obsessed with its pleasures and the books he adds to his personal library.

Like many readers, Bonnet writes in his books, knowing full well that it reduces their value. But he’s not interested in their value or selling them, but in what he learns from them. He remarks the most difficult part of a reader’s life is where to put all the books. Because his collection is so large, it makes it impossible to move. How I wish I never did.

But each move I have made meant discarding all too many books, books that I never wanted to part with. More than once, I have needed such a volume, only to find, of course, that it was gone, making it necessary for me to buy it once again. Bonnet suggests that “To lose one’s books, is to lose one’s past.”

Then there is the minor problem of how to organize them. There are bookcases in every room of my apartment. Fiction books are organized by author’s last name in one room. Academic books are organized by topic in my study. And a miscellaneous collection of history, travel, biography and memoir reside on the bookshelves in another room.

Phantoms on the Bookshelves takes us on a stroll among Bonnet’s books. We meet their authors who he claims we know very little. We also meet their fictional characters that Bonnet says we know a great deal.

“Authors are just fictional people, about whom we have a few biographical elements, never enough to make them truly real people. Whereas the biography of a literary character, even if it is incomplete—and explicitly so—is perfectly reliable: it is whatever its creator decided. So are his or her acts and words.”

Bonnet reads widely and he introduces us to a great many of those he most enjoys. It is clear, to paraphrase him, that the books that sit upon his bookshelves bring are the closest he will ever come to paradise on earth.

And just recently my favorite bookstore in Paradise (Hawaii), where I spend the winter, closed recently. It was a Barnes and Noble, one of the many in this chain that have closed lately in this country.

I feel the loss keenly. The store was located in the part of town I like most, where I used to go almost every day. Now it is gone. And I no longer go to the area as often as I used to. As if this isn’t enough, it will be replaced for a women’s clothing store, Ross: Dress For Less. “For the latest trends, the hottest brands, and unbeatable savings you gotta go to Ross.” What has happened to this country?

There is still one Barnes and Noble left in town, deep underground in a huge mall, where is almost impossible to find a place to park and with a collection of books that can’t hold a candle to the one that is now defunct. I have no choice, not an enviable feeling.

Now I have to order most of my books online or read them on my e-book, which is a world apart in my view from print editions. I know many readers face this problem now, also not an enviable feeling.

This year before I left for Hawaii, I took a look at all the books in the fiction bookcase and it almost led me to cancel the trip. I thought about the hours I spent reading some of them, the pleasure they brought to my days, the way they made them livable. I picked out a few to take with me, to read them again and recapture some of their magic. Most of them I had to leave, a great loss.

And then I thought about all the books I’ve read on my iPad and realized they weren’t there on the bookshelf. They were nowhere, yet another disadvantage of reading e-books. Verlyn Klinkenborg expressed a similar view in the Times recently:

“…I realize that the physical books are serving a new purpose — as constant reminders of what I’ve read. They say, “We’re still here,” or “Remember us?” These are the very things that e-books cannot say….This may seem like a trivial difference, but that’s not how it feels. Reading is inherently ephemeral, but it feels less so when you’re making your way through a physical book, which persists when you’ve finished it.”

E-books Don't Smell

“The smell of a freshly printed book is the best smell in the world.”
Karl Lagerfeld

My iPad doesn’t smell and of course the e-books I read on the Kindle app don’t either. However my printed books do, a pleasure derived from my very first days of reading and one that I miss with those I read on an e-reader.

Printed books don’t smell the same either, a feature that broadens their pleasure. Age, paper, binding and cover contribute to these differences. It has been described this way:

The ink and chemicals used in the production of a book reacts with heat, moisture and light, causing the organic materials to break down. This is especially true for books with high acidity, like those made during the 19th and 20th centuries.

The books deep in the library stacks at the university where I went as an undergraduate smelled old, some a bit musty. The air circulation down there in those days was poor, it was hot, and dark. You had to switch a light on to find what you were looking for on the shelves.

That smell was quite different from those Bantam paperbacks I recall reading as a kid. Whenever I come across one of those paperbacks today, they still smell the very same way.

“When I open them,
most of the books have the smell
of an earlier time leaking out between the pages -
a special odor of the knowledge
and emotions that for ages
have been calmly resting between the covers.
Breathing it in,
I glance through a few pages before returning each book to its shelf.”
- Haruki Murakami (Kafka on the Shore)

Strangely, after all of these years, I’ve not forgotten the peculiar blend of paper, leather, and dust that I inhaled each time I stepped foot in the little neighborhood library of my hometown.

It is hard to describe odors in general and even harder to describe the various smells of books. We don’t have words for the wide range of odors that come our way even though the sense of smell is one of our most primitive.

Yet, it has been estimated that humans can distinguish thousands of different odors—aromas, fragrances, and scents. Though we can make such distinctions, we can attach a name to only fraction. However we can conjure up countless associations to the distinctive smell of books—the book we read on a park bench in Flore ce, or the one we read on the floor at Powell’s, another deep in the stacks of what is now known as the Green Library, etc.

If you miss the smell of e-books as much as I do, you will be pleased to learn that through the wonders of technology, our problems have finally been solved. Thanks to Smell of Books, you can now chose to give your e-books a distinctive smell with their “revolutionary new aerosol e-book enhancer.”

But wait there is more. You can now choose between five, no less, distinctive aromas—classic musty, crunch bacon, eau de cat, new book, and finally their five star aroma, sense of scent of sensibility.


You can also relax secure in the knowledge that “Smell of Books™ is compatible with a wide range of e-readers and 100% DRM-compatible. Whether you read your e-books on a Kindle or an iPhone using Stanza, Smell of Books™ will bring back that real book smell you miss so much.”

Physicality of a Book

A book is more that the words on the page, the story that is told, and the way it is written. A book is also possessed of sheer physicality. How heavy is it, how thick, or how many pages, what is the cover like, does the paper have a distinctive odor, is there room in the margin for comments, what is the typeface, etc?

Of course, these features, as well as other ancillary features of reading a book are relatively minor compared to the real reasons we read a book, although they cannot be entirely discounted. Recently there has been some discussion of these matters on the various Web sites I visit.

Dust Jacket
There is the matter of dust jackets. Some books have them, some books don’t. Are they necessary? I am reading two books now, neither of which has one. What purpose do they serve? Can they be met without a dust jacket? Some dedicated readers believe one of the major downsides of the new e-books is the absence of a dust jacket or a book cover.

Deckle Edge
Then there is the matter of the edge of the page—rough, smooth, or deckle edge (uncut). I remember returning from France a long time ago with a load of deckle edge books. A knife was required to cut open the pages; there was something rather special about these books, as if they were in someway more authentic than their smooth edged counterparts.

Sustainable Highlighting
For those who don’t like to write in their books, there is now a way to avoid doing so by placing a “verdant sticky” next to passage you would normally underline or highlight. Simply place one of these Japanese designed stickies next to the passage and later remove it to reuse again after you’ve added the passage to your collection.

Bookshelves
How do you arrange the books on your bookshelf--randomly, alphabetically by author, color of cover, fiction, biography, poetry, culinary, etc? Lately, I simply add the book to whatever open space I can find. And when I search for a previously read book, I am more often than not able to find it simply by the color and design of the book cover.

Dollars and Cents
There is the cost of a book, a matter that cannot be easily dismissed these days. Shall I wait for the paperback edition? Or hold off until one comes into the library? Or planning ahead, why not buy a Kindle or a Nook, or the forthcoming iPad and start downloading them “in less than a minute” for $9.99 or, in an increasingly number of cases, for nothing.

The Case for Books

For some time since her operation, and without publication its goal, she had been jotting down without order or pattern, anecdotes gleaned from the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, noting down those matters or events which moved her. One day these notes and fragments of thought might form a coherent mosaic and reveal to her her own spiritual autobiography as well as biography of her time.

Frederic Tuten The Green House

During a period when it is reported that people are reading less and less and when it is also said the era of the book is coming to an end, Robert Darton has written a ringing statement in its defense. He regards the invention of the book—a codex of bound pages--as one of the most important technological and cultural achievements in human history. In his The Case for Books, he has also made a compelling case for the practice of keeping a commonplace book.

Darton’s volume consists of a set of essays concerned with the past, present and future of books. In one of the first, he very perceptively comments that: “The staying power of the old-fashioned codex illustrates a general principle in the history of communication: one medium does not displace another, at least not in the short run.”

I believe this principle applies widely—putting a gas station on one corner is not going to put the one across the street out of business. If anything a third gas station will soon spring up on one of the other corners. Television did not put an end to radio, nor will the Web put an end to motion pictures, newspapers or periodicals. Those who fear that the end of the book is near should be ever mindful of this principle.

In another essay, he invites reader to consider the essential properties of a book. “It has extraordinary staying power. Ever since the invention of the codex sometime close to the birth of Christ, it has proved to be a marvelous machine—great for packing information, convenient to thumb through, comfortable to curl up with, superb for storage, and remarkably resistant to damage.”

Like so many other readers, young and old, Darton believes that reading the screen version of a book is inferior to reading it on the printed page. He cites Bill Gates, who has very large and fancy screens and who speaks ardently about the New Web Lifestyle, that when it comes to reading more than four or five pages, he usually prints the document instead of reading it online. Gates says he likes to keep the printed pages with him, to annotate and re-read whenever he wants. And he continues, “…it’s quite a hurdle for technology to match that level of usability.”

In the chapter, The Mysteries of Reading, Darton reviews the history of commonplace books and why they were such important sources of information and ideas in the early days of reading. As it still is for some readers today, reading and writing were considered to be inseparable activities. You read and you took notes or you copied passages and you preserved them in your commonplace book to review and use in future conversation, debate, or writing. It was also a new book, one that reflected your own personality and the unique way you came to interpret the world as seen on the pages of the books you read.

“Commonplacing was like quilting: it produced pictures, some more beautiful than others, but each of them interesting it its own way. They reveal patterns of culture: the segments that went into it, the stitching that connected them, the tears that pulled them apart, and the common cloth of which they were composed.”

Weekend Links: Books & Reading

Half-Read Books

Espresso Book Machine

What to Read?

Hybrid Books

Most Influential Book

Active Reading

Half & Half

In commenting on the photo of sliced up copy of A Suitable Boy, at Book Bench Thessaly La Force writes:

A colleague of mine once tried to read Vikram Seth’s “A Suitable Boy.” Finding it too heavy for travel, she tore the book apart. Some might say, “sacrilege,” but I say, “practical.”

Why would you ever have to tear a book apart? Put it in your backpack if you can’t fit it in your suitcase. Or take it with you in your carry-on travel bag.

I can't imagine ever wanting or needing to tear a book apart. If you had a hardback copy of David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest and no room in your suitcase or backpack for it, would you slice it down the middle? Why the middle? You’d probably need to slice that tome into tenths.

If you had a 1,000 year old beautifully translated version of War and Peace that you had no room in your suitcase or backpack for, would you slice it down the middle?

I used to know someone who would tear the pages out of a book once she had finished a page. She did that to avoid marking her place in the book with a bookmark. What a booklover she was!

Of course, I only saw her do that when she was reading cheap paperback novels. Since I never saw her reading David Foster Wallace or Leo Tolstoy, I doubt if she ever had need for anything as humdrum as a bookmark.

Books are treasures the most treasured of all treasures. They are sacred. From one who values books and devotes much of their life to them now, I can’t imagine cutting one into separate portions, paperback or hardback, practical or not.

The heaviness of books is often given as a reason to favor the Kindle and others electronic readers like it. An electronic version of Infinite Jest would fit right into your coat pocket or purse. But the Kindle is not a book, although it might be argued it provides the same message as a book does.

But the reading experience is altogether different. And for those of us raised before the digital age, reading always meant more than the message. It also involved the mode of delivery and the situation in which it was delivered--the typeface, the cover, the paper, the size of the book, the binding, etc.

The Physicality of Books

Stephen Carter, novelist (The Emperor of Ocean Park) and Professor of Law at Yale, asks “Where’s the Bailout for Publishing?” in the March 21st The Daily Beast. His question is not entirely facetious. In fact, he is deadly serious and says books are critical to the future of American life, surely just as crucial as some of the current beneficiaries of those monstrous bailout sums. He writes:

“Books are essential to democracy. Not literacy, although literacy is important. Not reading, although reading is wonderful. But books themselves, the actual physical volumes on the shelves of libraries and stores and homes, send a message through their very existence. In a world in which most things seem ephemeral, books imply permanence: that there exist ideas and thoughts of sufficient weight that they are worth preserving in a physical form that is expensive to produce and takes up space. And a book, once out there, cannot be recalled. The author who changes his mind cannot just take down the page.”

Against the emerging background of the digital revolution, Carter is making an important point. He is suggesting that the sheer physicality of a book is crucial, that books are not simply words. In contrast, to an e-book, a printed book has a place on the shelf, the library shelf or the one in your home, a place that is different in several respects from the virtual place it has in cyberspace.

All of us are aware that the places where books can be felt and touched are rapidly diminishing. Bookstores, especially the small independent ones, are closing at a rate that is distressing to anyone who cares deeply about the pleasures they bring. The same is true for the public libraries that are shutting down and those within our universities and colleges that are being transformed from places to read and peruse books to banks of radiating computer stations. And then there are the book publishers themselves, some of which are closing up shop, while others are drastically cutting back on the number of books they publish. Carter is right: the book world needs a bailout stimulus that is every bit as deserving as the banking, insurance, or automotive sector. He writes:

“In a library, you can stand beside the shelf and run your finger along the spines. You can feel the book-ness of what has been written. It is a very unsophisticated reader indeed who conceptualizes the library principally as a place to obtain information. A library is a shrine to the book. When we eliminate the name “library,” as some universities and communities have done, creating such vulgarities as “information resource centers,” we are implicitly, denigrating the very object that the library is intended to preserve. The book, we are saying, is not important, only its information content matters.”

Carter argues this is a serious mistake, that a book is more than the words on its pages. Because it is a physical object and takes up space on a shelf, we can run our hand over it, pick it up, explore its pages and be surprised by what we find. And we can do the same with all the others placed nearby. By saying this he is clearly stating that there is an important difference between the book as a physical object and the one it becomes in electronic form. His argument here is more complex than the matter of a bailout or physicality of the book so will be reserved for another day.

Top 100

I tend to read books that in some measure make contact with my life and the issues that are central to my thinking now. For the most part, they inevitably tend to be contemporary works of literary fiction.

Since this is the time of the year for resolutions and since I rarely make any, I am going for the first time in a long while to make one—to read more of the classics. And since I have newly arrived in the world of literature, it is clear that I have a lot of catching up to do. At this point in my life, it has become a race against the clock.

Where to begin? Several years ago the Guardian published a list of the top 100 books of all time. The list was based on the selections of 100 “noted writers” from fifty-four countries. Here is the unranked list arranged alphabetically by author. How many have you read?

Chinua Achebe, Nigeria, (b. 1930), Things Fall Apart
Hans Christian Andersen, Denmark, (1805-1875), Fairy Tales and Stories
Jane Austen, England, (1775-1817), Pride and Prejudice
Honore de Balzac, France, (1799-1850), Old Goriot
Samuel Beckett, Ireland, (1906-1989), Trilogy: Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnamable
Giovanni Boccaccio, Italy, (1313-1375), Decameron
Jorge Luis Borges, Argentina, (1899-1986), Collected Fictions
Emily Bronte, England, (1818-1848), Wuthering Heights
Albert Camus, France, (1913-1960), The Stranger
Paul Celan, Romania/France, (1920-1970), Poems.
Louis-Ferdinand Celine, France, (1894-1961), Journey to the End of the Night
Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, Spain, (1547-1616), Don Quixote
Geoffrey Chaucer, England, (1340-1400), Canterbury Tales
Anton P Chekhov, Russia, (1860-1904), Selected Stories
Joseph Conrad, England,(1857-1924), Nostromo
Dante Alighieri, Italy, (1265-1321), The Divine Comedy
Charles Dickens, England, (1812-1870), Great Expectations
Denis Diderot, France, (1713-1784), Jacques the Fatalist and His Master
Alfred Doblin, Germany, (1878-1957), Berlin Alexanderplatz
Fyodor M Dostoyevsky, Russia, (1821-1881), Crime and Punishment; The Idiot; The Possessed; The Brothers Karamazov
George Eliot, England, (1819-1880), Middlemarch
Ralph Ellison, United States, (1914-1994), Invisible Man
Euripides, Greece, (c 480-406 BC), Medea
William Faulkner, United States, (1897-1962), Absalom, Absalom; The Sound and the Fury
Gustave Flaubert, France, (1821-1880), Madame Bovary; A Sentimental Education
Federico Garcia Lorca, Spain, (1898-1936), Gypsy Ballads
Gabriel Garcia Marquez. Colombia, (b. 1928), One Hundred Years of Solitude; Love in the Time of Cholera
Gilgamesh, Mesopotamia (c 1800 BC).
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Germany, (1749-1832), Faust
Nikolai Gogol, Russia, (1809-1852), Dead Souls
Gunter Grass, Germany, (b.1927), The Tin Drum
Joao Guimaraes Rosa, Brazil, (1880-1967), The Devil to Pay in the Backlands
Knut Hamsun, Norway, (1859-1952), Hunger.
Ernest Hemingway, United States, (1899-1961), The Old Man and the Sea
Homer, Greece, (c 700 BC), The Iliad and The Odyssey
Henrik Ibsen, Norway (1828-1906), A Doll's House
The Book of Job, Israel. (600-400 BC).
James Joyce, Ireland, (1882-1941), Ulysses
Franz Kafka, Bohemia, (1883-1924), The Complete Stories; The Trial; The Castle Bohemia
Kalidasa, India, (c. 400), The Recognition of Sakuntala
Yasunari Kawabata, Japan, (1899-1972), The Sound of the Mountain
Nikos Kazantzakis, Greece, (1883-1957), Zorba the Greek
DH Lawrence, England, (1885-1930), Sons and Lovers
Halldor K Laxness, Iceland, (1902-1998), Independent People
Giacomo Leopardi, Italy, (1798-1837), Complete Poems
Doris Lessing, England, (b.1919), The Golden Notebook
Astrid Lindgren, Sweden, (1907-2002), Pippi Longstocking
Lu Xun, China, (1881-1936), Diary of a Madman and Other Stories
Mahabharata, India, (c 500 BC).
Naguib Mahfouz, Egypt, (b. 1911), Children of Gebelawi
Thomas Mann, Germany, (1875-1955), Buddenbrook; The Magic Mountain
Herman Melville, United States, (1819-1891), Moby Dick
Michel de Montaigne, France, (1533-1592), Essays.
Elsa Morante, Italy, (1918-1985), History
Toni Morrison, United States, (b. 1931), Beloved
Shikibu Murasaki, Japan, (N/A), The Tale of Genji Genji
Robert Musil, Austria, (1880-1942), The Man Without Qualities
Vladimir Nabokov, Russia/United States, (1899-1977), Lolita
Njaals Saga, Iceland, (c 1300).
George Orwell, England, (1903-1950), 1984
Ovid, Italy, (c 43 BC), Metamorphoses
Fernando Pessoa, Portugal, (1888-1935), The Book of Disquiet
Edgar Allan Poe, United States, (1809-1849), The Complete Tales
Marcel Proust, France, (1871-1922), Remembrance of Things Past
Francois Rabelais, France, (1495-1553), Gargantua and Pantagruel
Juan Rulfo, Mexico, (1918-1986), Pedro Paramo
Jalal ad-din Rumi, Afghanistan, (1207-1273), Mathnawi
Salman Rushdie, India/Britain, (b. 1947), Midnight's Children
Sheikh Musharrif ud-din Sadi, Iran, (c 1200-1292), The Orchard
Tayeb Salih, Sudan, (b. 1929), Season of Migration to the North
Jose Saramago, Portugal, (b. 1922), Blindness
William Shakespeare, England, (1564-1616), Hamlet; King Lear; Othello
Sophocles, Greece, (496-406 BC), Oedipus the King
Stendhal, France, (1783-1842), The Red and the Black
Laurence Sterne, Ireland, (1713-1768), The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy
Italo Svevo, Italy, (1861-1928), Confessions of Zeno
Jonathan Swift, Ireland, (1667-1745), Gulliver's Travels
Leo Tolstoy, Russia, (1828-1910), War and Peace; Anna Karenina; The Death of Ivan Ilyich and Other Stories
Thousand and One Nights, India/Iran/Iraq/Egypt, (700-1500).
Mark Twain, United States, (1835-1910), The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
Valmiki, India, (c 300 BC), Ramayana
Virgil, Italy, (70-19 BC), The Aeneid
Walt Whitman, United States, (1819-1892), Leaves of Grass
Virginia Woolf, England, (1882-1941), Mrs. Dalloway; To the Lighthouse
Marguerite Yourcenar, France, (1903-1987), Memoirs of Hadrian

In response to these selections, the Guardian published another set the year after, this time a ranked list at http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2003/oct/12/features.fiction. Two other lists are at http://www.randomhouse.com/modernlibrary/100bestnovels.html and I am sure there are a good many more.

Favorite Books of 2008

Leaving aside a few of the very excellent articles I have read in The New Yorker, here is list of my favorite literary works in 2008.

Pascal Mercier’s Night Train to Lisbon was far and away the finest novel I read this year. See my account at http://marksinthemargin.blogspot.com/2008/10/night-train-to-lisbon.html. After reading a book like this, I find it to find anything that comes close.

David Rieff Swimming in a Sea of Death. David Reiff, the son of Susan Sontag describes his mother’s prolong battles to overcome three episodes of cancer

Ann Patchett”s What Now? is an edited version of a recent comment speech she delivered at Sarah Lawrence. Like everything Patchett has written it is both jolly and thought-provoking.

Richard Bausch’s Peace, is a tragic tale of a group of American soldiers fighting their way up Monte Casino during World War II

Carol Cassella’s Oxygen tells a suspenseful story with an unexpected ending of a terrible error she made or thought she made, as an anesthesiologist in a Seattle hospital.

Maruki Murakami’s What I Talk About When I Talk About Running describes Murakami’s ambitious, sometimes astonishing ventures running marathons and beyond, as well as the significance of running on his writing life

Philip Roth Indignation. Here Roth tells the tale of a young college student growing up in, yes, in Newark who tries to emerge from his, yes, Jewish family, by heading off, yes, against his father’s wishes, to a second rate college far from home.

Andre Aciman’s Intimacy is Aciman’s part real, part fictional account of returning to the neighborhood in Rome that his family emigrated to after leaving Egypt. It was published American Scholar, Summer 2008.

To see the selections of two other readers of literary fiction I invite you to see the list that James Wood, the New Yorker’s literary critic, put together at http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/tny/2008/12/james-wood-eleven-favorite-boo.html.

Maureen Corrigan who reviews books on NPR also has a list at http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=98334820

Wood and Corrigan agree on their favorite book for the year, Joseph O’Neill’s Netherland. While I read O’Neill’s novel, I didn’t find it as notable as they did. I will have more to say about Netherland in another post.