Classic Mike: The Love of Books

[TOP is closed for a few days, so I've taken the liberty of posting a few old articles you might not have seen before, or might not mind seeing again. This piece is Mike-juvenalia, practially—I must have written this when I was in my 20s. Under the influence of both Twain and beer, probably. Neither of which were terribly good for me.

These days I read about sixty books a year, and although this was written 40+ years ago, I still have read only two of Jane Austen's!

If, like me, you love books, I recommend A Gentle Madness by Nicholas Basbanes, which is to the love of books what The Omnivore's Dilemma is to books about food—the one book on the subject everyone should read if they read only one.

It's funny, though, that the attitude expressed here is my approach to buying photobooks—I tend to be the opposite of a completist, desiring just the right sampling of a photographer's work and then, rather than piling on more books by the same person, moving on to someone else. Goes to personality, I guess. Everyone's different, and to thine own self be true.

Hope you enjoy. —Mike]

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“What! Another damned, thick, square book!
Always scribble, scribble, scribble, eh, Mr. Gibbon?”

—William Henry, Duke of Gloucester,
on being presented with a volume of
The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire

From the time I was a small child, my brain got soaked with books. My mother read to me most every day, and a great many of my childhood memories are wrapped up in books: I can still recall my wide-eyed, frightened thrill to the old woman tossed in a basket, seventeen times as high as the moon, and I wanted Mike Mulligan and his Steam-Shovel (my earliest encounter with my Luddite tendencies) read to me over and over again. As an older child of six I pored over books about sailing ships, imperiously directing Mom to take notes.

But I have never been a fast or a good reader. In my early grade school years I never could keep track of which direction j’s and k’s and b’s and d’s were supposed to face (a mild form of what we now call dyslexia, although then no one ever gave it a name), and words with similar numbers of the same types of letters, such as except and expect, might as well have been identical twins dressed in matching outfits for all I could tell them apart; even words that are only second cousins visually, such as opinion and onion, could sometimes send my conceptions veering abruptly off down the wrong path. (He stood on the floor of Congress and proclaimed his onion? What?) On a large page of small type with few breaks, it was not a rare event for me simply to get confused, like a man dog-paddling in choppy gray waves at night might become discombobulated and lose track momentarily of which half of creation is water and which half air—sometimes I just had to strike out for the landmark of the previous paragraph indentation, and wade in again from there.

Age and experience have mitigated some of those difficulties, but exacerbated another. One of the less pleasant landmarks in my life as a reader was when a maxim I first saw on a needlepoint pillow hit home. I had seen the pillow in a shop window in the boutique town of Harbor Springs, Michigan, one hot summer day when I was a teenager. Surrounded by filigrees of pixelated needlepointed ribbon and flowers, the motto was, “So many books, so little time.”

Naturally, I immediately dismissed this as merely quaint and cute, as words rendered in needlepoint are intended to be. But I remembered it, and eventually I felt overcome by a strange fascination, and the unsettling profundity behind the homily began to fill me with dread. I realized that the future was not a limitless prospect, that my time on this earth really will be brutishly short, and that, no matter what I do, I must perforce depart this coil with books left unread. Many of them. A great many, in fact. This is obvious, of course; but when I first realized the truth of it in my heart, it oppressed me.

Every writer’s first duty, I have therefore concluded, ought to be to not write so damned much. There are already far too many books. They have been piling up for five centuries now, and although great books have been written in every age, quality, on average, is not improving. These days, especially, there seem to be as many people writing books as reading them, and those who write books write far too many. Have you ever taken a look at the Stephen King shelves at your bookstore? That fellow needs to haul in the reins and take a deep breath, if you ask me. He is in need of a good hobby, such as gardening, or watching NASCAR races on TV. Margaret Mitchell had a better idea: spend a long time writing one really good book, and then get out of the business.

As a reader, I prefer slender books to fat ones, and fewer books in a writer’s output to more. I am grateful for Graham Greene, who put no more into most of his books than a steady reader can get back out of them again in a short stint of effort. I appreciate Jane Austen, who spent her entire life fussing over a mere six books—none of ’em too fat—because six books is not too many for me to read before I die. Where Jane Austen is concerned, I have two down, four to go, and high hopes.

Charles Dickens’ David Copperfield is a great book—I have read the whole damned thing, from one cover to the other, I am eager for you to know—yet the man himself drives me to despair. I guess by definition his life was long enough for him to write all he wrote, but this amazes me, because my life cannot be long enough for me to read it all. Dickens must have kept quill and ink-pot handy at every moment of every day—at the breakfast table, in the bathtub, and while strolling in the garden. Geese must have trembled at his appearance, afraid their plumage soon would be pillaged to supply him with pens. Ink manufacturers must have beamed at their children in self-satisfaction at the rightness of the world, thinking of Dickens. He surely wrote faster than some men can talk, not to mention better; and, at that, he must have lived a long and energetic life to write all he did and still have had time for things like meals, haircuts, and going to weddings.

Nowadays there is an additional criterion by which books are made and sold, besides poundage. Poundage still counts, however. A man named Dumas Malone, for example, wrote a biography of Thomas Jefferson that initially I felt would be good for me to read. It might in fact be a fine biography, not that I’d know: I later discovered that it would have taken me about as long to read about Jefferson’s life as it took Jefferson to live it in the first place. The one fat, thick, square book this Malone fellow scribbled was daunting enough, but when I had got a third of the way into it, and noticed that life seemed to be progressing very slowly for old Tom, I discovered, to my dismay, that there was a second volume as thick and square as the first, and then another one after that, and then more, stretching all the way into the distance. Six or eight books in all, or perhaps ten…it’s all the same.

I gave up without finishing volume one, glad that I hadn’t invested several seasons of my spare time accompanying Tom Jefferson down the many miles of his trail, the author and I stopping together to examine every twig at Tom’s feet.

I would like to read biographies of my betters, and can see the sense in doing it. But only if the authors would summarize.

The second criterion by which books are sold nowadays is that to all appearances, it seems that the less actual labor an author has logged, the better. The fashion seems to be to ensure that editors remain underemployed, their wallets thin, their wan children drabbed out in secondhand clothes. Let an author earn a lot of money with one book, and the next one is sure to be gassy and long, suspiciously resembling a first draft, with writers’ darlings in it that any less parental an eye would have struck dead. The principle seems to be that a long line of words blurted out piecemeal is more desirable than a shorter line that is better considered, I suppose relying on the belief that genius has to well up and spill over, like an artesian well, and that water that must be drilled for cannot taste sweet.

Another cause behind this fashion—my guess is—is that nearly everyone goes to college now, never mind how illiterate or hostile toward learning he or she may be, and college English professors are in a position to command students to work hard doing things while reading that authors ought to have done while writing. This lulls authors into believing that clarity and purpose are not worth toiling for, since professors will drive their poor put-upon students to great labors hunting out the meagerest of authorial meanings in the densest of verbal thickets.

It seems to me a grave mistake to count on this, from the author’s side. Have you ever been in one of that endangered species of used bookstore in which sheer quantity is the only organizing principle? There are not very many such warehouse stores left, the advantage being that you will know it when you are in one. I got lost once in the old Powell’s, in Portland, Oregon. I can still remember how the place smelled. If you have gone to the vast musty half-dark mazes where the old fiction is warehoused, where shelves stretch down row after row into the darkness and rank upon rank until you have to lift your head up now and then to remember the points of the compass and the way out, then perhaps you have realized that you are in a graveyard, and that most of those old books have gone there to die. As in real graveyards, hordes of murmuring spirits from times past cluster there, thousands and thousands of them—young girls with their hearts set on a man and young men with their hearts set on glory; stock-company characters; travelers and stay-at-homes; the residents of towns, cities, and prairies; comedians, tragedians, ghosts, villains cruel and cunning to be o’ercome, discoverers and poets and inventors and matronly aunts and stern fathers and funny friends and sisters and brothers and schoolmates and neighborhood bullies and pets of every stripe—the repositories of ten thousand authors’ conjurings. And with many of those old books, it is possible that not a single person will ever read them again. How many of these neglected dusty books have people now even heard of? One in ten? One in a thousand? Five thousand? Think of that.

So if anyone is going to spend the hard effort it takes to write words, he or she, it seems to me, ought to ride the whole way into town instead of just four-fifths the way there, and finish up by polishing, taking out the words that don’t belong, lightening up on the reader’s load, and going as far as can be gone to help his or her tales make the long reach to posterity. Most books, after the first flush of interest they provoke has ebbed, are forgotten. Novels especially. Why tempt such a fate?

But then who am I to say? I never did graduate from college. The professors flogged me to extract deep subterranean symbolism from the books we read, and wanted everything related to serious political ideas despite the fact that I was not interested in politics at the time. Well, at least not the politics that consumed Turgenev, or Stendahl, or Richard Wright at the John Reed Club in 1936. Most of what I could decipher were the stories up at the surface, and stories, the truer the better, have generally been enough for me. I take it for granted that I should try to imagine the people in books as if they were, or had been, real. It seemed an obvious part of the compact the author and I had made—she by writing the story, I by picking up her book to read it.

But my real problem may be that I make headway against the tide too slowly. There are just too many great books. I do try. But I imagine that in the moment I meet my death, I will be halfway through a great book, feeling sorry that I could not reach the end.

Mike

© 2017 Michael C. Johnston, all right reserved.

Note: No comments are Featured on Classic posts. See the Comments Section for all the comments.

Comments

[Chuck Albertson]

I used to spend many Sunday afternoons in Powell's while I was going to law school (when I probably should have been studying). You had to fend off a mob of Burnside Bombers to get in there, and Powell himself was working the cash register. It's not the same now, too bright.

[John Shriver]

Powell's is a major wholesaler, selling used books to used book stores elsewhere. I've seen multiple boxes of used books from them at the Harvard Book Store.

[Yoram Nevo]

Just wanted to mention Daniel Pennac's "Reads Like a Novel" / "The Rights of the Reader" ("Comme un roman")

[John Krill]

These back issues are really fun to read. Why don't you put one of these classics up every weekend?

[D. Hufford]

I still like books which are up there on the poundage scale, assuming that they are interesting to me. I think I really got in that habit in the early 90s when I was living in Toyama Japan and there was no Amazon, and only one sorry little book store that sold maybe 10 English language books. I grew to like books that would take me plenty of time to read. If they were good enough, I'd read them again. A 600 plus page book about MacArthur, and Hedrick Smith's "The Russians" are two I remember well as I read and enjoyed each 2-3 times.

Things changed a bit 3 years ago when I moved from a near American size apartment to a more typical Japanese sized one and had to dispose of well over a hundred books, keeping only a select few. Now most of my non-photo books are on Kindle which is a much less pleasant way to read. I tend to forget to finish many books I buy as they aren't on a table beckoning me to finish them, and reading them on a Kindle gives me a bit of Claustrophobia and is too much like staring at a computer screen.

So maybe shorter books will be my new pleasure. Or maybe not. Victor Hanson's "The Second World Wars" has so far kept my interest.

[Alan Whiting]

The good side of "so many books, so little time" is that you'll never run out of good things to read. This was the conclusion of a friend of mine, who is fluent in three languages and so has an even larger task.

[John Krumm]

I've really enjoyed all these blasts from the past. Regarding books about loving books, Walter Benjamin at the Dairy Queen in the only one that I clearly remember enjoying.

I had a similar "big book" experience trying to read an absurdly large version of Thoreau's complete journals, in bed. Practically broke my ribs. Someone decided it was a good idea to take a nice, many-volume paperback (out of print) and re-issue it as an atlas-sized behemoth with four pages on each page. Never did order the second volume.

[Burton Randol]

A comment about your thoughts concerning the desirability of carefully considered economy of expression, from Pascal's Lettres Provinciales XVI:

"Mes Révérends Pères, mes lettres n'avaient pas accoutumé de se suivre de si près, ni d'être si étendues. Le peu de temps que j'ai eu a été cause de l'un et de l'autre. Je n'ai fait celle-ci plus longue que parce que je n'ai pas eu le loisir de la faire plus courte."

Very free translation:

"Reverend Fathers, I do not usually write such long or frequent letters, but the little time at my disposal is the cause of both faults, and this letter is as long as it is because I haven't had the time to make it shorter."

[Dave Levingston]

As a counterpoint, John Sandford's Saturn Run (sorry, I don't know how to properly bold face titles on here) was so enjoyable that I started reading his crime novels and have now read everything he has written. So I wait impatiently for each of his new books to be published, passing time with lesser writers and wishing he could turn out one a month rather than one or two a year. I'm apparently not alone in this opinion, having noted that le Carre's new novel has fewer than half the number of holds placed on it at my library than Sandford's latest.

On the other hand, I'm reading Joyce's Ulysses. And by "reading" I mean that it is on my Kindle and every few months I read a page or two. It doesn't really matter, since none of it makes any sense whatsoever. I expect to be able to say that I'm reading Ulysses for the rest of my life.

[Mike Marcus]

Thank you for finding time between your book reading to keep writing these posts. But, I have to tell you that one of the reasons I don't read more books, in my retirement and before, is that I spend much of my daily reading time with the modern form of well written prose in blogs like yours and Kirk Tuck's (and now it appears that you will again be consuming more weekend time too). Despite that, I still do plug away, digging through the many stacks and shelves of books now clogging the formerly empty spaces in our home. (Just finished Tim Egan's "The Worst Hard Time" about those living ... and dying ... on the 1930s dust-bowl lands. His title gets it right.)

I am very impressed that you can find time to read 60 book annually with your, like mine, bit of a dyslexic problem. Then, still, you have time to pile up as many electrons as you do for this mostly daily blog. I think 60 books should become my goal too, but that might result in less time for your blogging, as I still need time to go outside for a few photos and time for LR.

I too have loved the few visits I have made to Powell's. But Portland is far from Albuquerque, so I have to make do with visits (warning: used bookstore plug ahead) to Page One, a much smaller but near to me book cemetery, to borrow your appropriate phrase.

[David Dyer-Bennet]

Ebooks have gotten me into reading big heavy books again; for a decade now I've found myself avoiding them because it was physically unpleasant to manipulate them.

I read nearly exclusively fiction, and nearly exclusively long series; I seem to be pretty much the opposite of you in this regard :-). But I don't feel the slightest urge to read all of it. Back in highschool I read most of the SF that was published, but never since, there's just too much (and SF is just one small corner).

Pleased to see more detail on the famous Pascal quote!

[Mark Power]

Dickens is great but a while back I began reading Thackeray and Trollope mainly because I got their collected works for $1 each on my Kindle. Thackeray was a great discovery. I suppose I read Vanity Fair in high school but of course it was wasted on me then. I dont think anyone today can match Thackeray for wonderful description of character. "I know she never could have been handsome; for her figure was rather of the fattest, and her mouth of the widest; she was freckled over like a partridge’s egg, and her hair was the colour of a certain vegetable which we eat with boiled beef."
From Barry Lyndon. Today the brilliant man would be arrested for a hate crime or freckle shaming or something.

[Miserere]

I remember looking forward to the publication of Mark Twain's autobiography. Then it came out in 2010 and it was over 700 pages long, and I thought "Oh, OK, well...I can manage that". Then I discovered it was volume 1 of 3, and thought "Oh... Oh... Ummmm... Sorry Mark, I'm afraid I'm going to have to sit this one out."

Maybe it'll be my retirement project.

If I ever retire...

[I had exactly the same reaction! I'm waiting for the abridged one-volume edition.... :-) Mike]

[Steve Jacob]

Many years ago, when I was teaching science at high-school, I made a mistake on the board.

One of my students copied it down incorrectly.

What he actually wrote was correct - it was me that was wrong. All the other kids just blindly copied my mistake.

He was not even aware of my mistake. He just assumed that I meant to say what I should have said in the first place, and that's what he wrote.

We were beginning to recognise dyslexia as a diagnosis, and he did struggle with English. He did very well at science though, because he relied on logical context to derive the meaning of a word, rather that literal recognition. This meant he had developed a very good memory and sense of reasoning.

He overcame his spelling difficulties the hard way, rote learning the spelling of certain words by the sounds of the letters. He struggle with proof reading, but seldom made mistakes.

I seem to remember he read physics at uni.

[Dave New]

I've gone through fiction/non-fiction (actually reference materials) phases. During my peak 'producing' years (that is, actually making stuff, as apposed to managing stuff), I thought it a waste of valuable time to read anything other than trade magazines and the famous O'Reilly "animal" technical books (my trade is embedded software development).

I've softened in my old age, and for the past several years have once again taken up reading fiction (mostly science fiction which has been a life-long passion), and find that I can enjoy it without feeling guilty about the time spent reading it.

I've also starting reading more long titles on my Kindle, as it doesn't break my nose as easily as a large book might when I doze off at night in bed. I also have bookshelves full of books, and really need to start slimming down, so collecting electronic titles that weigh nothing interests me. Eventually, on retirement, the wife and I are interested in full-time RVing. In particular, we wish to visit all the parks, in pursuit of my landscape photography. That won't leave much space for books, so I will need to be very choosy.

Many years back, I had the unpleasant experience of being angry at a thick book (Dhalgren), because I insisted on reading it to the very end, in spite of the fact that I didn't care for it. I thought that at some point it would finally resolve to something I could like, but it managed to elude me to the very end. One of the few books I recall just tossing in the trash when I was finished. It may have been the reason I swore off fiction for some period of time, come to think of it.