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.

Why I Asked For, And Got, A Kindle For Christmas

It was the only item on my Christmas list, and it was underlined three times, and Santa, bless his heart, got the message.  I have my own Kindle now, in its leather-like case with a magnetic clasp that closes with a satisfying flop.

Why a Kindle, when I am not a Kindle type?  I wasn't an electronic typewriter type, either, yet became addicted and immediately started composing as if it had been plugged directly into my brain.  Nor was I a computer type, or a laptop type at first.   For all I know, I may be an Ipad, Iphone, and Ibrain type, too.  I just don't know it yet.

But there are more substantive reasons than the charms of new technology for my desire to own an e-reader:  blizzards and relapses.  In my admittedly cosseted existence, I count as a disaster being stuck in a blizzard, or in a CFS relapse, without a stack of books beside me.  Unfortunately, in the last seven years in Vermont, I have often been stuck without a book to read.

Each of the villages around here has, along with its adorable white-spired Congregational church, an equally adorable but tiny library on the town green.  These are lovely white-painted frame buildings with tall multi-paned windows  through which the clear winter sun shines on the wide pine floor boards, the antique card catalogs, and the sparse book collection, in which the works of Danielle Steel are generously represented.  Not that I wouldn't, if driven to it by the hazards of weather and CFS, actually read one of Danielle's books--if I could only get to a library when it was open.  Like the post offices and town dumps around here, libraries have charmingly erratic schedules, never the same two days in a row, never open when you need them.

The independent bookstore forty-five minutes from my house (practically next door, in Vermont terms), stays open from dawn to dusk, seven days a week.  It is the cynosure of the region.  You can get lost in its narrow hallways and book-lined nooks until the aroma of Green Mountain coffee draws you out of the labyrinth and into the land of panini made with local goat cheese.  As well as books, you can buy children's toys here, scrumptious blank diaries and quirky jewelry.  And you can listen to speakers about causes dear to a Vermonter's heart.

Alas, much though I love this place, it does not entirely satisfy my book needs.  The writers I most like to read--Evelyn Waugh, Iris Murdoch, P.G. Wodehouse, Anthony Trollope--are not in fashion, are represented by a single or at most two volumes that I have unfortunately already read.  I don't know this for a fact, but I suspect that 90% of the books on the shelves were published after 1990.  I do not blame the store for this.  As we all know, independent booksellers have to bend with the prevailing winds to survive.

Hence my Kindle.  It's easy on the eyes and on the hand.  The books in e-form are cheaper than their paper counterparts, and available at all hours in case of blizzard or relapse.  Many of the books whose copyrights have expired--the Murdochs, Trollopes, et al.--are free.  And they don't take up space on my groaning bookshelves.

I hope my owning a Kindle doesn't make me a traitor to good writing and reading.  This gizmo gives me access to out-of-print books that I would otherwise not be able to read, just as Gutenberg's invention made it possible for a person to have her very own bible under her own roof, one that she could light a candle and read if the wind woke her up in the middle of the night. 

Last night, with the temperature near zero, the coyotes were feeling frisky.  Awakened by their unearthly chorus I fired up my Kindle, and read myself back to sleep.

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.

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.