My wife is a library person. They don’t understand why anyone would want to buy a book that they could just as easily borrow. I have tried to explain to her the comfort and satisfaction I get from having my bound friends filling my bookshelves. But you’re either born a book store person or a library person, and there doesn’t seem to be any way to bridge that gap.
When I was a kid – yes, this is one of those stories – we only had five TV stations and they only showed cartoons for a couple of hours each Saturday morning; video games meant Pong and there were no computers outside of NASA and the Pentagon. I spent a lot of time playing outside and a lot of time reading. The fact that I am a writer and an editor, and have not swung a bat, kicked a ball or in any other way worked up a sweat since before Joanie loved Chachi should make it clear which one of my childhood pursuits better suited my personality.
I was always reading something then and I’m always reading something now. Sitting on my nightstand are "Lady Chatterley’s Lover" and Paul Theroux’s "The Pillars of Hercules," and I always have a pile of 20 or so books waiting their turn. The difference between then and now, of course, is that when you are 14 you can spend all day enjoying a good book, but as an adult you’re lucky to get more than 15 minutes at bedtime to read for pleasure.
My undergraduate diploma may indicate that I had a double major in communications and English, and I have been known to dazzle crowds at parties with stories of my minor in psychology, but the fact of the matter is that I considered myself an English Literature major; the rest of it was little more than paperwork pirouettes to earn the diploma.
In college I spent a lot of time with Shakespeare, James Joyce and Dylan Thomas, and devoted many a late night to writing dreadful poetry of my own. When a few of my pieces were published in the university literary quarterly, I made it known that I planned to become America’s first millionaire poet. Imagine my parents' reaction to that one.
I haven’t written a poem in years and years. Like dance and mime, I’m not sure what purpose it serves in modern culture. But any English major worth his salt keeps copies of "The Faerie Queene" and "Spoon River Anthology" handy, just in case.
English majors are always asked what their favorite book is. Once upon a time I would carry a top 10 list around in my head and reel it off, along with lengthy critiques of the titles and their authors, to those foolish enough to ask me. If you were to ask me that same question today, I’d try to respond in three paragraphs or less:
Some of my favorites are holdovers from required reading lists in high school and college – "Heart of Darkness," "Catch-22" and "To Kill a Mockingbird" have all stuck with me – though I have to confess I tended not to read them until after it was too late, grade-wise. Again, imagine my parents’ reaction.
There were others that seemed to me like personal victories because had I stumbled across them on my own and felt I’d saved them from the proverbial slush pile (though they are, in fact, renowned classics): Thomas’ "Portrait of the Artist as a Young Dog," Jack London’s "John Barleycorn," Kazuo Ishiguro’s "Remains of The Day" and Thomas Berger’s "Little Big Man," for instance. Some of my favorites are books I avoided for years because I couldn’t believe they were as good as everyone claimed (they are) – Truman Capote’s "In Cold Blood," for example – and others I ignored because critics looked down their noses at them (without reason, as it turned out), like Bram Stoker’s "Dracula."
There are books that I believe everyone should read: John Irving’s "A Prayer for Owen Meany," Voltaire’s "Candide," Kurt Vonnegut’s "Slaughterhouse Five."
Over the years I’ve come to think of some writers as friends or mentors or heroes of some kind, because I’ve read so much of their stuff. My shelves are filled with everything I’ve been able to find by Vonnegut, Irving and Robertson Davies, for example, because of their insights into human nature as much as their ability to spin a beautiful sentence. Graham Greene is criminally underrated in this country, I think, but I’ve done my best to collect all of his books. I’m a huge fan of George Orwell and Leo Tolstoy, but Jack Kerouac and Hunter S. Thompson take up almost as much shelf space in my den. Philip Roth and John Updike have been showing up more and more recently, as have Bill Bryson and Paul Theroux, the manic and depressive personifications of travel writing.
And, just to throw everyone off the scent and make them think I’ve actually got a brain in my head, I have several shelves filled with history books. I used to read quite a bit more history than I do now. The trend over the past few years of amending history to further contemporary political agendas has made it increasingly hard for me to find much history worth reading. I just don’t have the time for 800-page tomes meant to convince me that Queen Elizabeth I would vote Republican or that Christ was an environmentalist.
Every summer I dive back into Proust’s "In Search of Lost Time" and every December I reread Dicken’s "A Christmas Carol."
Okay, that was six paragraphs. So sue me. When you ask a fanatic a question, you have to expect a fanatical answer.
What's a book?