On Books (Part One)

I love to read books, and I love to read about books. Some of my favorite fictional characters are bibliophiles, and some of my favorite essays are about the joy and utility of reading. I am embarking on this meandering commentary, inspired by a book recommended by Heather, entitled Ex Libris: Confessions of a Common Reader, by Anne Fadiman. My thoughts are by no means exhaustive.

Last night I re-read a book that had a huge impact on me when I was a child. I think I was in sixth grade when I read it, only because I associate it with the library at my middle school rather than my elementary school, though the reading level is low and the complexity of the story is minimal. It's called The Girl With the Silver Eyes, by Willo Davis Roberts, who was, apparently, in her heyday in the late 1980s. What I hadn't realized until re-reading it now, nearly 2 decades later, is that this book shaped me not only as a reader, but as a writer. I unconsciously used the basic framework of this story for a novel I completed in 2005. Not that there weren't huge differences, of course, and it could not be considered plagiarism in any way, but what's interesting is that I had no idea that this little book had influenced me so much. It's a good book, to be sure, but not revolutionary or mind-blowing--nothing more than a simple story about a little girl with paranormal powers who only wants to belong to something.

The thing is, this little girl was a reader. She taught herself to read at the age of three, and she swallowed books whole from then on, allowing herself to become so engrossed that she forgot reality entirely, for hours at a time. It is a little cliché, but without that trait, I probably would have stopped reading. Telekinesis is a cool ability, but the fact that she loved books, well, that's what made me like her.

C.S. Lewis stated that "literary experience heals the wound, without undermining the privilege, of individuality." I'll have to go back and edit the wording of that quote, but it is one of my favorite concepts of all time—that all of us who love to read have at one time felt. I know some people read to escape. I don't. I read to connect. It expands your soul in a way that few other endeavors can, and at comparatively little cost. Lewis compares individuality to a wound. Everyone at some time or another has felt alone, abandoned, neglected, an outsider. When you read, you can share experiences with other people, lose the aloneness, without anything or anyone encroaching on your sense of self. You become immersed in someone else's identity without surrendering any of your own. It's beautiful.

Books as physical objects are probably going to, within the next 10 or 20 years, not necessarily disappear, but become less and less common. When that idea was first put about, I scoffed at it. Who could actually come up with any kind of substitution for a book? Why would anyone want to read a novel on a computer screen? Isn't the whole point of reading inextricably intertwined with the fact that you can do something very productive while lying in bed on your stomach? Then Amazon convinced me that it was not only possible to create an acceptable digital book, but that it was a good idea. I still worried about the future of print books, though.

Then, the further I got into library school, the more I became convinced that this direction was good. Furthermore, Apple launched the iPad, which has an e-reading application that works with multiple platforms of e-books. Print books would become a thing of the past, and good riddance—those bulky, incommodious things that make relocating so difficult and make packing for a week-long trip such a hassle, having to choose, choose, choose.

But honestly, I'm beginning to revert back to my old opinion. No substitution for a print book is going to be satisfactory. Period. Why? Because books are friends. I don't care how many bells and whistles e-books have; you might be able to e-highlight and e-annotate and e-mark for weeks, but it's not the same as touching the pages and writing notes in your own hand. You might be able to carry a thousand books on one device, but doesn't a good novel deserve its own physical space, disassociated with all the others? Where is the justice in forcing The Complete Works of Shakespeare to share dominion with XHTML for Dummies?

Simplify. Standardize. Water down. Invalidate. It starts with noble intentions, but where does it stop?

And on to another issue. Book abuse. Anne Fadiman considers the "misuse" of books to be a form of love and esteem. She shared a killingly funny story about her brother, who left a book open, face down, on his bedside table, and was rebuked by the maid, who chided him for treating the book with so little respect. I understand Fadiman's sentiment here, but I can't quite agree. I take the centrist view, though slightly leaning on the side of the maid. Do what you want with your own books, but I like mine to be well-kept and pretty, even if I have read them seven or eight times. Underlining and annotating don't count as abuse for me, but leaving it open face down will break the spine and make the pages start falling out. And then you have to make a difficult choice: replace it, or allow it to become a thing of the past? And why would I want to put myself in a position to have to replace a book when there are so many other books I could buy instead—books I might not have read yet and which might further alter the course of my life?

If it's library bound, there isn't much you can do to destroy it unless you plan ahead, but as most of us do not own library bound books, I feel I need to care for them as well as I can. The only exception I have made to this is in mutilating my combined copy of Pride and Prejudice and Sense and Sensibility, because I needed to tear it apart in a unique way in order to use it as source material for a novel I started writing a few years ago. And anyway, that edition was a gift which, while I appreciated it, was not one I would have chosen for myself, being ridden with typographical errors and bad illustrations in addition to having an even more than usual unwieldy shape and size.

One of my 8th grade students' favorite days in the classroom (aside from the day I slipped on a posterboard and nearly kissed the chalkboard) was the day I did the demo on BOOK ABUSE. The school dictionaries were absolute crap, and I mean absolute crap as in none of the definitions made any sense and most of them were circular, as well as being a horrid shade of red that clashed wonderfully with our orange desks, orange carpets, and orange cabinet doors; so I could easily justify using them as guinea pigs for how not to treat a book. This included tossing it behind me, dropping it, knocking it off the desk, breaking the spine so it would lay flat without my hands holding it open, sitting on it, and other sorts of atrocities.

And when I first began thinking of my personal book collection as a personal library, I used to threaten my siblings with all sorts of ultimatums if they abused my books. Mostly the ultimatum was that if you don't treat it by my own personal standards, you will lose your borrowing privileges, which they mostly recognized as an empty threat, because I loved getting other people to read the books I liked. Still do. But some of my personal standards included: do not eat while reading my books, do not leave my books open face down, and most importantly, do not leave my books on the floor, even if it's not in a general walking path. I think my sisters have always considered me a little despotic about my things. But what would you do, growing up in a house full of five children, where personal possessions of any lasting nature were somewhat rare, and the only things you actually wanted to own (ruling out, of course, the horrible clothes procured from who knows where that you wore because you had to but wished you could die rather than appear in them in public) were the things you spent your own, hard-earned money on? A shelf full of books was something to be proud of. It's true I almost always had more stuff (books and music) than my sisters did, but that's because I worked hard to make money to buy them.

What lovely memories those trips to Bookstop are: finding yet another L.M. Montgomery novel to add to my bookshelf, using Dad's discount and spending my three dollars to go home and transcend myself. Never mind that the only reason I had that three dollars was because I babysat a troupe of little girls who never stopped talking and were constantly trying to look down the back of my shirt to see my bra. Or another troupe of little girls, of which the eldest tied me to a chair, locked me out of the house, and flooded the bathroom.

My library was bought with a price, and I was going to keep it pretty.

So, in writing this, I have come to the conclusion that while I am definitely not as erudite as Anne Fadiman (in spite of the fact that I'm a reader and a writer, I think my vocabulary sadly underdeveloped, and I hate word games and only know a few answers on Jeopardy), and I don't view the organization and care of books in exactly the same light, I don't love books any less than she does.

I told you this post was going to meander.