When You've Read All The Books

"The flesh is sad, alas, and I've read all the books," (La chair est triste, helas, et j'ai lu tous les livres) yawned the French poet Stephane Mallarme a hundred years ago.  He was a young man then, and his wife had just had their first child, but he got bored easily.

It's taken me longer to get to that point--to the book part, that is--but lately I've been feeling depressed about reading.  It's not that I've read all the books, of course--neither had Mallarme.  But I've read an awful lot of them, probably too many, and now I'm like a foodie who's tired of fancy food. 

I feel as if I've read all the dead authors, and the living writers I do like don't write fast enough to feed my habit.  Kate Atkinson, A.S. Byatt, Nick Hornby, Penelope Lively, Ian McEwan, Julian Barnes, Margaret Drabble, get on with it!  You're not getting any younger, and I'm almost to the end of everything that Trollope ever wrote.  Please write faster!

Meanwhile, the great annual book sale for the benefit of the village library is coming up next weekend.  It's held at the local school's gym, which is crammed full of cafeteria tables loaded with thousands of books, from novels to manuals on auto repair. 

The minute you walk in the door, you see everybody you know, carrying cardboard boxes and tote bags and pulling shopping carts.  When the books they've chosen get too heavy to carry, they stack them up along the walls.  Occasionally you stumble on the semi-recumbent body of someone who couldn't wait until he got home to start reading.

People circulate among the tables with their eyes glazed, bumping into each other and muttering excuses.  And from the full cardboard boxes and overflowing carts you can get the feel of a Vermont winter, of long dark evenings by the wood stove with a stack of books at hand.  Gathering reading provisions at the July book sale is one of those preparing-for-winter rituals, akin to chopping and stacking wood, that prudent Vermonters engage in even in the heat of summer, because in these parts winter is always lurking in the back of people's minds.

Every year since I moved to Vermont I have attended the library sale, and staggered home with a New Yorker tote bag full of old books.  But I'm thinking about skipping the sale this year.  I'm afraid of finding that I've read everything out there, and even more afraid of buying books only to discover later that I've already read them.

Still, I'll probably go just for the pleasure of seeing my friends and neighbors preparing for winter, and because there's always the chance that I might find an author I've never heard of before and without whom I cannot live.  Maybe I haven't read all the books.

Reading, Writing

My mother's sister says that she taught me to read when I was three years old.   "That can't be right!" I interrupt--she is, after all, 92--but she persists, "Don't you remember reading La Vanguardia with me?"  And the memory comes back of sitting on the terrace of my grandparents' farmhouse.  It is summer, and a storm is coming in.  You can smell the rain on the dusty road to the next village long before you can see it.  There is a clap of thunder and my aunt looks up at the black sky, "The angels are banging their furniture around," she says.  Then her finger lands on the next line of newsprint, "Tell me what this says."

Lest I appear precocious, I should mention that Spanish spelling is highly phonetic, so a three-year-old reading the newspaper is not as extraordinary as it might seem.  But it wasn't exactly ordinary, either.  My early reading was the combined result of my aunt's eagerness to show me off to her rival, my mother--"See what I can do with your child!"--and my urge to comply and be praised.

My aunt's enthusiasm earned me years of boredom in school.  On the first day of class, when we were handed our new textbooks, I would go home and rush right through the readings book, followed by the history and then the religion books.  After this the remainder of the school year was a trek in a desert of tedium, relieved only by bursts of terror in math class.

This gorging on school books came to a halt when I landed in an American high school with only the sketchiest knowledge of English.  But I compensated by whizzing through the French texts--so much easier than the ones in my other classes--and as a result I was bored to tears all the way through my college French major.  It wasn't until grad school prelims, when there wasn't even a reading list because we were supposed to have read every "serious" book ever written in the French language, that I felt I had more reading than I could handle.

But how did I celebrate my dissertation defense?  I went to the library and checked out all the authors who hadn't been deemed worthwhile by my professors--Colette, Simone de Beauvoir, Marguerite Duras...(Yes, all of them women.) 

And what am I doing today, a couple of centuries later, when I'm not dealing with the dogs or the garden or the hens?  I'm reading.  A lot of women writers, and a lot of British writers whom I didn't get to read while I was teaching Romance Languages:  Anthony Trollope, P.G. Wodehouse, A.S. Byatt, Penelope Lively, Kate Atkinson.

I read too much.  I read instead of writing.  "Read everything you can get your hands on," writers are told, but that is dangerous advice, for who wouldn't rather read than write?  Who wouldn't rather eat than cook?  True, you do learn from reading (some) writers.  But really, you learn to write by doing it day after day, sentence by sentence, world without end, amen.  And by deleting, deleting, deleting.  "Renunciation is the writer's honor," Colette writes.  See?  I did learn something from reading.

But mostly I read because, other than eating, it's the earliest thing I can remember doing.  A friend used to say of a man we both knew that he was such an obsessive reader that while you were talking with him he would try to read the brand on the sole of your shoe.  I am probably afflicted to a lesser degree, but, like an alcoholic, I never rest easy unless I have a  stash of books safe in my cellar.  God forbid I should set out from home without something to read in my bag--who knows where I might get stuck?  And especially when a storm threatens, and we're expecting one tonight, I like a thick book by my side.

I Think I Need One Of Those Assault Thingies...

Just kidding.

But around here the war is escalating.  You might say that Nature is in surge mode.  Last night, when my husband let him out to scare any deer that might be feasting on what's left of our plants, Wolfie was attacked by something in the yard.  From the description--low to the ground, a bit smaller than Bisou--I think it's a fisher.  Speaking of Bisou, it's a good thing she was asleep upstairs with me at the time.  Usually she's right on Wolfie's heels, sallying forth into the outer darkness.

Anyway, poor Wolfie yelped, and the critter scurried, and Wolfie came limping into the house.  There was no bleeding, no particularly tender spot that we could find, but he could not put weight on one of his hind legs.  It's amazing how miserable a solid black dog can look.  And there's something about a big dog in distress that makes you feel particularly helpless.  You can't pick him up and put him on a comfy pillow.  You can't exactly cuddle him.

I gave him a couple of baby aspirins in a teaspoon of peanut butter.  He could not climb up to the bedroom, and whimpered so pitifully at the bottom of the steps that I decided to sleep downstairs, to keep him company.  But he couldn't settle.  He was desperate to lie down but in too much pain to do so.  I gave him two more baby aspirins and he finally lay down and went to sleep.  Then of course I worried that I had overdosed him, and kept putting my hand on him to feel his breath.

Thanks goodness for Penelope Lively's How It All Began, a witty and wise novel that you all would love.  I read for a couple of hours and then turned off the light.  But the minute I closed my eyes I remembered that it was supposed to snow heavily today.  If Wolfie was still in distress in the morning, how would we get him to the vet?  I fell asleep, but Wolfie woke up and put his head on my knee.  It occurred to me in my stupor that this meant that he was still alive.  Then I did some coughing (which I've been doing for a month now, along with everybody else) and slept for about a minute, and Wolfie put his head on my knee again....

This morning it is in fact snowing hard.  Wolfie seems a bit better, and ate his normal breakfast.  But I don't relish the prospect of having to take him and Bisou out on leashes every night.

This cloud is not, however, without a silver lining.  Fishers are the only predator known to kill porcupines.