Category: books
(I'm off to Baltimore tomorrow, followed by a few days in DC, so this will be my last post until next Thursday.)
The cover of Sunday’s New York Times Book Review carried an essay by Pete Hamill on the noble beauty of baseball in 1950s New York. It was disguised as a review of the new Willie Mays biography, but it talked almost as much about the Brooklyn Dodgers – and the pain of lost youth – as it did about The Say Hey Kid. Indeed, toward the end of his hackneyed elegy, Hamill confessed that his despair over the Dodgers’ move to Los Angeles caused him a crisis of faith so great that he gave up watching baseball and never saw Mays play as a San Francisco Giant (which he did for 14 years, at the peak of his career).
Reading this confession, I felt pity for Hamill and exasperation at the Book Review. Why on earth would you pick to review a book about a brilliant athlete someone who missed that athlete’s glory years? Then it hit me: It is the NEW YORK Times Book Review, Hamill is a NEW YORK writer, Mays began and ended his career in NEW YORK. Who cares what he accomplished someplace else? And who cares what anyone outside of the five boroughs might make of those accomplishments? As usual in publishing, it’s all about New York.
The nice thing about having a library in South Florida is that it never gets disturbed. Most people who come into our condo pretend the books aren't there; at most they'll ask: "Have you read all of these?" To which I usually reply: "Twice." But almost never is anyone tempted to actually examine the collection, let alone ask to take a volume home.
But this week Hania's cousin is visiting from Warsaw, with his wife. The first evening Jurek started talking about travel writing, and mentioned Jan Morris. I said I'd just reviewed her latest book, a collection of vignettes from her years on the road. He asked if he could take it on their cruise. I reluctantly said yes, though I suggested that he should really get a paperback thriller with raised letters on the cover.
I showed him my shelf of Jan Morris books, and recommended "Pleasures of a Tangled Life." What was I thinking? He asked if he could take that too. It's a two-week cruise.
In the Caribbean. I went to my travel classics section and pulled down V.S. Naipaul's "The Middle Passage" and Patrick Leigh Fermor's "The Traveler's Tree," both with chapters on islands their ship will stop at. Jurek said he'd take the Leigh Fermor book; the binding of the Naipaul book was coming loose and he was afraid of causing more damage.
I showed him another book I'd recently reviewed: "Hammer & Tickle: The Story of Communism, a Political System Almost Laughed Out of Existence." He thought he might find this interesting as well.
So now my library, normally pristine, is shot through with holes. I think of Anatole France, who said: "Never lend books. People never return them. My library is full of other people's books." I've read stories of passengers falling overboard and now wonder about books. And I tell myself: "This is not going to be a problem with Kindle."
Hania's been on me to write a Christmas wish list, though I'm more tempted to write a "don't wish" list, at the top of which would be a Kindle.
Though I love all the articles and talk about Kindle. The more people rave about it, and the more people buy it, the sooner we'll see the second step in the process: the rediscovery of the simple beauty of the book.
In case you were wondering, I finished Shimazaki Toson's Before the Dawn this week (after going to the library and extending the due date). But I didn't close it - after reading the glossary and rereading the introduction - with the sense of accomplishment I had expected to feel.
Of course, there was the relief you always feel when finishing any big book, knowing that you're now free to go out in the evening and pick up other - slimmer - books.
But the sadness of the ending (I won't divulge the details because I don't want to ruin your own reading of it) combined with the realization that, for all the hours I had spent with Toson, I had read just one more book in the vast universe of books. Every morning I walk into my living room and am confronted with stacks of unread books. Perhaps this is the appeal of Kindle - the absence of a physical presence, a constant reminder, a guilt-producing mass.
Yesterday evening I drove down to Miami for a gathering of media folks at the Conrad Hotel and, finding few writers among the crowd, I headed down to Books & Books in Coral Gables.
My friend David was working the cash register. It was a slow night at the end of summer. We caught up on news, only occasionally interrupted by a customer. A white-haired man in suspenders handed David a slim children's book and asked the price. "I can afford that," he said, handing over seven carefully counted one dollar bills. David put the book in a brown Books & Books bag.
"Now it looks like you bought a girlie magazine," I said. The man turned to me and laughed. Heading out the door he said to his wife "a girlie magazine" and chuckled again.
A teenage girl with a Spanish accent asked if there were any Harry Potter books, and David went in search. While he was gone, I went outside and picked up a copy of The Oxford American - with my name on the cover - brought it inside and placed it prominently in the rack of more popular magazines. Tip for future bookstore employees: If someone asks for a big blockbuster, don't look where the computer says it should be; find the cardboard display case made specially for it.
A few late-night browsers wandered in. It was very pleasant standing there chewing the fat surrounded by books. I was transported back to my childhood in Phillipsburg, New Jersey, when I would spend happy afternoons sitting in my grandfather's liquor store on South Main Street. And I wondered: If he had had a bookshop, would I have become an alcoholic?
I never thought myself prone to the summer cliche of the great book read.
But in the summer of 2003 I read The Odyssey in preparation for a trip to Greece. A few years later I read Crime and Punishment before a teaching gig in St. Petersburg.
And what have I been lugging down to the pool this summer? Shimazaki Toson's 760-page epic Before the Dawn.
Of course, unless people actually see me hoisting the novel onto my lap they have no idea of its daunting bulk. Not that anyone these days asks, but if someone did wonder what I've been reading, and I said Before the Dawn, it wouldn't get the admiring looks that War and Peace or Infinite Jest would. No, for those I'm going to have to go to Japan.