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November 21, 2008
book-bearing urges
I have had, I’m afraid, a rather profligate book-buying November. Okay maybe not profligate, but certainly indulgent. And I’m trying to figure out why. There is a flat oak railing atop a half-wall that keeps folks in my kitchen from falling down the basement stairs. My purchases have settled in there and are beginning to raise the level of protection. Before they migrate down to my study, I wanted to inventory the most recent acquisitions. They are these:
Nathan Englander, For the Relief of Unbearable Urges (Faber & Faber, 1999)—I'd always meant to read it.
Edward Gonzales and David L. Witt, Spirit Ascendant: The Art and Life of Patrocino Barela (Red Crane Books, 1996)
Fernando Baez, translated by Alfred MacAdam, A Universal History of the Destruction of Books: From Ancient Sumer to Modern Iraq (Atlas & Co., 2004, 2008)
Enrique Sabater, A Sabater con un abrazon en el Quin Elisabet, Dali (Umberto Allemandi & Co., 1998)
Nicholson Baker, U and I (Random House, 1991) – (it’s a first edition)
Eduardo Lago, Llámame Brooklyn (Ediciones Destino, 2006)
Roberto Bolaño, translated by Natasha Wimmer, 2666 (FSG, 2004, 2008)
I’m eliminating from this list the books that migrated here in any way other than my making a purchase, as well as those that I’ve bought for holiday gifts.
With the exception of the Englander and the Baker fictions, and of 2666 (which only arrived in the house yesterday), I have already read parts of all these books—even though I have absolutely no time to do so. This is the period within the year when I work most assertively on my manuscript reviews.
When I carried the Bolaño novel into the house yesterday, I began to wonder what has caused this buying spree. And I feel certain that it’s being driven by some sensation of promise. But promise of what?
Promise of a harsh winter in Colorado?
The soothingly familiar promise of fall that (I think) is experienced by most folks whose lives, like mine, for too long played out on university campuses?
The promise that one day soon (February?) I won’t have a five-foot backlog of manuscripts to read?
The promise that my mind will last long enough that I will in some coming year be able to immerse myself again in a praxis of reading works that have actually already been published?
It could well be all of these. My wife and I, after all, did attend a retirement planning meeting this week . . . as if I ever could.
Maybe it’s nothing more than the urge to know. And it seems that I still want to know specifically through this medium that once was called cold.
An aside on format: All of these books are hardbound. Essentially, I don’t buy softcover books any longer. Last weekend, I uncartoned all my old paperbacks and alphabetized them (by author) on a rack of shelves in my out-garage so that my high-school-attending neighbors can come get them whenever they need a curriculum novel. My cell phone often rings with one of them asking for a specific forgotten work and, yes, I probably do have it on hand, somewhere, in some box, on some shelf. (Though I never did locate Separate Piece. Last week it was The Old Man and the Sea. Once, it was The Odyssey, but I wasn’t home and Kelsey wasn’t sure which edition to take. All of the books in the garage are now hers and Evan’s and Abby’s.)
But for whatevere ancient reason, I want these days to pick up a weighty volume and go where it takes me. I want to go there slowly, with no schedule, without the desire or need to evaluate what might be made better in the book, in its structure or its prose. I want only to take a book on its own terms (as any good reviewer does) and live in it, for awhile, upon those terms—at my own pace, smiling, meandering, curiously live.
But still, that strikes me as a strange list of books. Any insights to it I would appreciate.
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