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.

Book Sale

In late July every year my favorite community event takes place: the Library Benefit Book Sale. Volunteers fill the local elementary school gym with row upon row of cafeteria tables, and cover them with rows of used books: fiction, non-fiction, nature, cooking, self improvement, foreign languages, how-to, art, photography, history, poetry, biography. The covered walkways outside the school are lined with dozens of boxes of paperbacks. The historical society sells homemade cookies and cakes.

This is where Vermonters come to stock up for the winter. They line up on the sidewalks well before opening time, carrying canvas bags and pushing luggage carts and even small grocery carts.

I usually go to the fiction section first, stand by the table, and proceed sideways in merengue-like steps, perusing the spines of books as I go. It is important to keep ahead of the person behind me, while not pushing too close to the person ahead of me.

Every so often one of us stops, picks up a book and reads a paragraph or two. The polite thing, in that case, is for the person behind the reader to step behind him or her and take the next place in the line. That means, of course, that the person stepping behind the reader misses a number of titles, the exact quantity depending on the reader's girth.

Some intense, compulsive types refuse to step behind you as you read, but will stretch their bodies across you and practically push you away from the table, just to make sure they are not missing the book of a lifetime. In my experience, these persons are usually male. When they reach across me, I make a great show of stepping back and waving them to pass in front of me, saying "please, go ahead." But the irony is invariably lost on them. All they care about is finding books.

And finding books is important around here, what with the prospect of winter and sparse village library collections and the scarcity of bookstores. I always find terrific books, many by English women of the last century: Rumer Godden, Barbara Pym, Iris Murdoch, Penelope Lively, Vita Sackville-West--hardback books with front-page dedications in faded, spidery handwriting, smelling of mold and wet wool.

As I sift through the fiction offerings, I note an unusually strong presence by Thomas Kincade, "the painter of light," who, having desecrated the visual arts, is now making a stab at the novel. I also see a lot of books by Jan Karon, who tried to transplant the English-village comedy of manners into a small southern town, and didn't quite make it.

By the middle of the morning, my canvas bag is so full I can hardly lug it around. That's when I try to find a quiet corner, take stock, and force myself to return some books to the tables. This year I made myself discard several novels by Daphne du Maurier, and regretted it immediately. Maybe they'll be back next year.

Book Burning

Well, not quite.

But it's winter here again (temps in the 50s) and raining, and as long as there was no way I could be out pruning lilacs, I thought I would have a book purge. Since coming to Vermont, my book collection has increased considerably. This is because the small villages around here have proportionately tiny public libraries, so if you consume books at the rate I do, you have to buy them.

Fortunately, there is a mammoth used-book sale to benefit one local library every July, just after the solstice. People show up with shopping carts, and you can tell that, even though the days are still long, there is already that tiny shift that points the way to autumn and to the darkness beyond. And Vermonters are getting ready for the long nights by the wood stove. I show up too, minus shopping cart, and buy armloads of books, most of them good. In addition, the local independent bookstore had started carrying an excellent selection of used books, where I have recently purchased, just to name a few, the complete Mapp and Lucia set, several novels by Penelope Lively, and Trollope's Palliser novels.

The same independent bookstore will buy your used books, or at least the ones they deem acceptable. They are so overwhelmed with offerings, though, that they ask that you bring no more than three boxes at a time.

That's what I did today: filled up three boxes from a single bookcase, and dropped them off at the bookstore. It didn't take me long to fill those boxes, but if I had to defend my choices as to what I kept and what I eliminated, I would be hard put to do so. For example, I kept almost all the books by English women writers, a lot of whom I am devoted to. But I kept my two novels by Margaret Drabble, whom I'm not crazy about, only because she's the sister of A.S. Byatt, whom I love. Why did I hold on to nine books by Anita Brookner, who bores me to death? On the other hand, I did get rid of all the Rumer Godden books, except for The Battle for the Villa Fiorita and The Greengage Summer.

I was more ruthless with contemporary American women writers: Mary McGarry Morris, Elizabeth Berg, and Gail Godwin mostly bit the dust. I kept all the Jane Smileys and the Annie Proulxs--the former because she's funny, the latter because I'm scared she might find me and shoot me if she heard I'd gotten rid of her books. I parted with Sexual Politics, which I once devoured, but kept The Feminine Mystique, even though it always seemed a bit pedestrian compared to The Second Sex. I kept The Hite Report, but I suspect its days are numbered.

This, as you can tell, was the bookcase dedicated to women writing in English. But at the bottom I found a whole shelf of health-related books. The Power of Self-Hypnosis, Listening To Prozac...nothing ages faster than a health book. I did keep my well-worn copy of Dr. Spock's Baby and Child Care--in the original version where the baby is always "he" and the parent always "she"--for sentimental reasons.

My three boxes are gone, but I have barely scratched the surface. There is the bookcase of French books, the one of Spanish and Catalan books. The bookcase of dog and animal books. The bookcase of art books, and the bookcase of gardening books and spirituality books. The living room bookcases, full of as yet unsorted books. And the bookcases in my husband's study, which he will not let me touch.

I keep trying to come up with some criteria for making book decisions, but I can't do it. I know only too well that, of the books that I kept today because I once enjoyed them, there is less than a one per cent chance that I'll ever read any of them again. This bothers me: I am not a hoarder. If I haven't worn a piece of clothing in the last two years, I give it away. I have parted with porcelain demitasse sets and hand-embroidered guest towels without a second thought.

But books are a different story.

Lending Books

Some people love to cook for their friends. I like to cook for my friends too, and did so just this morning, in fact. But what I really like to do, is to lend my friends books.

A friend is going to the seashore for two weeks, and asked for a couple of reading suggestions. Not fiction, she specified, and not animal-related. She's a serious animal lover/breeder/husbandrywoman (?) and wants a vacation from all things furry, woolly or cuddly.

Well, I thought, that doesn't leave me with much to work with. Ninety-five percent of what's on my shelves is either fiction, or animal-related. But I looked anyway, and came up with a stack for her to choose from.

There's Scott Elledge's biography of E.B. White (my friend likes E.B. White), and David Lodge's biography of Henry James. (James, to whom nothing much ever happened, must have been a challenging subject.) There's Updike's painfully honest memoir, “Self-Consciousness.” And a couple of How I Survived My Mother autobiographies by women: Jill Ker Conway's “The Road from Coorain,” recounting the path from the Australian outback to the presidency of Smith; and Ruth Reichl's “Not Becoming My Mother”--her mother served moldy food to guests; Ruth grew up to become the editor of Gourmet Magazine.

I pulled out Kathleen Norris's “The Cloister Walk,” about a Protestant woman's discovery of monastic life and spirituality somewhere in the Dakotas, and added it to the pile. And because my friend is a sailor, I picked Steve Callahan's “Adrift,” about being lost at sea (I hope it will make her want to be prudent). I suspect she already knows Anne Morrow Lindbergh's “Gift from the Sea,” but I put that in just in case.

I found crazy, fabulous Anne Lamott's “Plan B: Further Thoughts on Faith,” another of her accounts of her lurchings through life, writing, and spirituality. What I really wanted for my friend was Lamott's “Traveling Mercies,” the first and best of her spiritual odyssey memoirs. But I couldn't find it anywhere. It was gone.

This is the dark side of my passion for lending out books. Some of them—usually the best ones—don't come back. (Please note that the friend for whom I'm compiling the present stack has promptly returned everything I've ever lent her.) People forget that they borrowed books. I forget I lent them out. This is what happened to my favorite David Lodge book, “Therapy,” and to many others.

But what can I do? The pleasure of lending out books far outweighs the regret of not getting them back—if I'm ever aware of not getting them back. I love pushing books on people as they're walking out my door: “Here's Konrad Lorenz on dogs. And he actually has little drawings on the margins! Here's A.S. Byatt”s “Possession.” Can you believe she's Margaret Drabble's sister? And Barbara Pym? She was popular for a while, then nobody would read her. Then she was rediscovered and was a wild success, and died soon after. Her novels have the smell of damp English wool in them...”

My friend will have to do with Anne Lamott's “Plan B.” But if she comes back from her vacation saying she loves Lamott, or Reichl, or any of the others, I will feel just as good, just as pleased and satisfied as if she'd smacked her lips after a serving of my chocolate mousse.

December 2008 "Snow Emergency"

The weatherman today announced the first real snow storm of the season. Five inches, plus ice and anticipated power outages. The indoors time is upon us.

I took the dogs out into the field for their exercise while the flakes were still sparse, and they seemed to feel the coming hoopla, running at each other and play-growling and leaping about. When I got everyone back inside I laid a fire in the stove and prepared to enjoy that snowbound feeling that is so delicious in December and so maddening in March.

And then I realized that I was out of books to read. In a house with seven bookcases, there was not a single page I either hadn't read before or had no interest in reading.

I got in the car and drove to the next village, the snow falling thickly. I didn't go to the grocery store for bread or milk or coffee. I didn't go to the feed store for laying mash or kibble. I went to the library.

There I wandered through the stacks unable to recall the name of a single author or the title of a single book I wanted to read. This always happens to me. I walk into a library and my mind goes blank. George Eliot? Who's that? And it doesn't help that 85% of the books in the local libraries are mysteries.

Eventually, I found two books by Margaret Drabble. One sounded wonderful, but upon opening it it rang a vaguely familiar bell. So I checked out the other one, which may well ring a bell later. Then I remembered hearing a wonderful review on NPR of John Crowley's Little, Big. But the library didn't have that one, so I checked out something by the same author called Lord Byron's Novel—The Evening Land. This had better be good, as I'm not as a rule fond of historical fiction.

I also got a book by Tana French, The Likeness, because the NY Times Book Review referred to the “lyrical ferocity” of her first novel, In The Woods. We'll see how lyrically ferocious The Likeness is. Also decided to give Kim Edwards's The Memory Keeper's Daughter a try, though I'm suspicious of the title: there seem to be a lot of novels with “somebody's daughter” in the title of late. And finally I took something called None Of Your Business, by Valerie Block, that I've already decided was a mistake. I read 25 pages and found it annoying.

So, five books. One by a man. My usual stack is all women. I'm still trying to make up for my grad school reading lists in French Lit, which included only two (17^th century) women writers.

The best part of this trip to the library was an encounter with the new Library Cat, a gorgeous long-haired calico who found me in the stacks and made overtures, then followed me to the table where I sat down and jumped into my lap and purred imperiously. So what could I do? I sat there and petted her until the snow got really thick, and then I got up, picked up my books, and went home.