Reading Prompts

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Perhaps it’s because maybe a half-dozen times in the past two years I’ve forgotten to click “publish,” or maybe everyone gets this, but WordPress started giving me daily prompts when I open the new post screen.  Everyday blogging questions such as whether you’re where you’d thought you’d be last year at this time, or what’s your favorite holiday food, or talk about your father or a father figure in your life (a loaded suggestion!).  I appreciate the thought, but I do strive for some measure of depth here.  Believe it or not, many of my posts are metaphorical, written about something that’s not the “obvious” subject of the mini-essay.  (Often when people criticize me it’s because I’m posting metaphorically.  Or maybe I just don’t know what I’m talking about.)  In any case, there have been times when a writing prompt might’ve been useful.  I haven’t used any, though.

Writing is a strange avocation.  These days many people make some kind of living as self-published authors.  The internet offers ways to minor fame—in some cases major fame—for anyone who has the time to put into it.  There’s always the question, however, of what to talk about.  This blog began, back in the days when I was fresh out of teaching religious studies, as a place where I could discuss the Bible and culture, or, more broadly, religion and culture.  That in itself limited the appeal.  People are fascinated by religion but really don’t want to read about it.  So it was that initially I had many followers—particularly among the biblical bloggers set—that eventually dropped off when I began writing about secular subjects.  Mostly I tend to focus on books.

There’s an irony to that as well.  As much as the internet helps some of us learn about books, it’s also a place that has diminished them.  Many people focus on social media to the point that there’s little time left to sit down with an actual book.  Interestingly enough, none of the prompts that WordPress now sets for me daily, has asked about what books I’ve been reading.  Perhaps books are the natural enemy of the online world.  If so, I seem to be caught between worlds.  I set aside time each day for reading, offline.  For those of us who write, reading is our food.  It often gives me the prompts I need for writing daily blog posts.  Even the days that I miss aren’t for lack of content—they’re simply forgetfulness because non-reading events crowd the rest of life.  It’s no wonder, then, that I try to engage others by asking, what books have you been reading lately?

Reading 2022

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Reading.  The crank of time seems to rotate faster each year.  For me, it’s noticeable when I look back on my year in books.  I find Goodreads indispensable for keeping track of what I’ve read, but also for giving me a snapshot of where I was.  On the cusp of 2023, I finished the year with 75 books read.  In general, my nonfiction reading at any one time is geared toward my research writing, non-university style.  So I began the year reading about ghosts for an article I was writing, then I read about Celtic religion for my Wicker Man book.  I started reading quite a bit about “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” toward the end of the year.  And I try to keep a healthy selection of fiction going as well.  So looking back over 2022, what were the most memorable tomes?

In nonfiction Brett Hendrickson’s Border Medicine, Gwen Owens’ Ghosts: A Cultural History, Harry M. Benshoff’s Dark Shadows, Edward Jarvis’ Sede Vacante, Grady Hendrix’s Paperbacks from Hell, Douglas E. Cowan’s The Forbidden Body, Shane McCorristine’s The Spectral Arctic, Russell Shorto’s The Island at the Center of the World, W. Scott Poole’s Dark Carnivals, and Philip Ball’s The Modern Myths stand out.  I think the most lyrically written book also falls into nonfiction was probably Alberto Manguel’s The Library at Night.  There were many other good books mixed in there too, but these give a pretty fair snapshot of the year, as I experienced it in the quiet hours before work, mostly, when the real work gets done.  (If you ever get curious, one of the categories on this blog is “Books” and that will bring up the many posts written on my literary year.)

Fiction’s always a little more subjective, it seems to me.  For example, I read Dark Shadows novels for nostalgia, not because they’re good.  What was good this year?  Leigh Bardugo’s Ninth House, Laura Purcell’s The Silent Companions, Andrew Michael Hurley’s Devil’s Day, Christina Henry’s Horseman, Shaun Hamill’s A Cosmology of Monsters, and Yan Ge’s Strange Beasts of China particularly suggest themselves by being memorable.  I also started reading collections of stories again, and Jorge Luis Borges’ The Alpha and Other Stories, Angela Carter’s The Bloody Chamber, and Daphne du Maurier’s Don’t Look Now were all well worth the time getting back into short fiction.  So many of the books I read were good on multiple levels.  Even those I didn’t so much enjoy, I learned from.  And I’m already anticipating a 2023, knowing no matter what else it will bring, there will be books.

Booking Dreams

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There’s a certain kind of person—many of with whom I work—who trade in the currency of books.  These are individuals who would rather be paid in books than in cash, and who worry of book orders shipped that seem to take too long to arrive, as if the rent check will be late because of it.  Who check the tracking number multiple times a day and can’t rest secure until the book is within their doors.  These people tend to be educated, whether formally or on their own, and they often wonder why the world can’t be a more amenable place because reading makes you realize the potential we miss.  My own reading convinces me that capitalism is mostly to blame.  It rewards the greedy and makes them try to fix elections and posture against other greedy leaders.  Books often show a better way.

I realize not everyone likes to read.  In fact, if you do so for pleasure you’re part of a minority group.  Those who read, and conduct surveys of those who do, estimate that only about five percent of the population reads and trades in books.  That makes us a very small nation indeed.  But some countries, such as Iceland, have higher proportions of readers, and other nations have lower.  Books, as a whole, saw a resurgence of interest during the pandemic because they are a way of getting together with other people and going to faraway places all within the safety of your own home.  I like to think a book-lined room is also well insulated.  Especially if all those little gaps are caulked with smaller tomes.  Occasionally photos of individual libraries circulate and go viral.  We’re impressed, we bookish folk, by those who read so much.

The book industry’s having a bad economic year.  In my own humble efforts I tend to read more than a book a week, on average.  I do this by reading more than one book at a time.  The amazing thing about that is you can pick up one of the multiple titles you’re reading and resume where you left off.  Very seldom is there any confusion or even forgetting what a book is about.  A physical book has so many tactile cues to remind the reader of things.  That’s why those of us who like to read tend to keep books.  We like to be able to go back and since we can’t predict our future wants and needs with any precision, we err on the side of collecting.  I do give books away but often I come to regret it because I need some unexpected volume again.  Books have their own economy.  If only we could all trade in books, it would be a very different, and I believe better, world.

Gift Books

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The New York Times recently ran a story suggesting that books are not only the ideal gift, but that this has been the case for a very long time.  The article points out that treasured Roman Saturnalia gifts included scrolls, or the books of the time.  Books are the gift of knowledge—who wouldn’t want that?  Also, I’ve been reading about the fact that money can be any medium of exchange as long as it’s agreed upon.  Why not books?  Being an American, it’s often amazed me how intellectuals are held in such low esteem in this country.  We pay our teachers poorly, we mock those who read “too much” (as if such a thing were possible), and we dismiss what experts of many subjects tell us because we don’t like to admit others might be smarter than we are.

Reading, like arithmetic, doesn’t come naturally to people.  We evolved to survive and reproduce and our brains have that prime directive.  Along the way, however, we learned to communicate effectively and cooperate on large ventures.  These ambitions required wrapping our brains around things like advanced math and learning to interpret squiggles written by somebody else.  Kids, full of energy and needing to play, don’t want to sit down to learn these things.  At least most don’t.  In some parts of the world those who do take naturally to such things are celebrated.  Teachers are venerated.  Learning is revered.  Ironically, in this country where some of the best higher education is available, we want to belittle those who attain it.  We prefer to play with our guns.

Now that the holiday season is upon us, however, I think of reading.  I keep a list of books I would like to have.  It’s well over a hundred titles long.  In a good year I can read sixty or more tomes.  It’s an engine that requires a lot of fuel.  Although in all likelihood I’ll never be able to retire, I keep my books against that time when I fear I might become bored.  Or that my mind might start to slip.  Reading is mental exercise.  In my current writing project, I’ve been discovering new connections almost daily.  Often in unexpected places in books I learned about only in recent months.  I write these words surrounded by books.  There are more in the attic, and more in the next room.  I may not ever have enough money to retire, but if we ever decide that books should be currency—and even if we don’t—I’m wealthy indeed.

Virtual Unreality

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You walk into a bookstore and browse.  Maybe you’re looking for a specific topic, or something to fit your mood, but you don’t know exactly what.  Then a title leaps out at you.  Maybe it’s a book you’ve never heard of before, or perhaps some long forgotten suggestion, nearly extinct, comes back to you at the sight.  Whatever the reason, you know you have to read this book.  You buy it and go home happy.  This is a uniquely human experience.  Yes, it applies to the leisured class who have money for books, but it is something that makes many of us feel good.  Those enamored of the virtual world are trying hard, according to the New York Times, to develop an app to replicate the experience.  Without luck.

Perhaps while browsing you meet someone else.  If you’re not too much of an introvert you might ask if they find the book they’re holding good.  Maybe you go get a coffee to discuss books.  This is just one of the many things that could happen.  Here’s another: someone is sitting at a table with piles of books s/he has written.  If they’re well enough known they may have had a public reading from one of them earlier.  You might strike up a conversation.  You might learn something.  A bookstore, you see, isn’t only about books.  What app developers can’t replicate is the phenomenon of literate culture.  Apps want you to buy things.  So do bookstores, but they also want to cultivate community.  Sure, you could buy your virtual book and then go to Facebook to talk about it, but that’s not the same thing.

Those advocating for a virtual world seem more escapist than even your average bookworm.  It’s been observed that when George Lucas was devising Star Wars he took care that no books or paper be shown.  This was a post-print world.  Some believe this is the direction in which we should go, and certainly during a pandemic at times it seemed right.  Even so, when the miasma began to clear a bit some of us first ventured back to bookstores.  Indeed, books fared well during those long months of enforced isolation.  We seem to think that any human experience can be replicated with the aid of technology.  The thing about serendipity, however, is that it’s unexpected because it seems to speak directly to you and how you feel at that exact moment.  No amount of data mining will reveal such things.

Ode to Books

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There are fewer things more personal.  Each one has a story and it reveals quite a lot about you.  Really, it’s a brave thing, putting your books out on a shelf for others to see.  Seldom have I read a book more euphoric about a book than Alberto Manguel’s The Library at Night.  A deeply literate book collector unashamed, Manguel takes the reader on a pleasurable tour of many aspects of libraries, including his personal one.  Libraries may represent many things because books are so varied.  Many of us who are bibliophiles are used to trying to justify our libraries to those who don’t care to read or to complaining movers threatening to quit.  Or even to those who write books claiming other books are clutter.  Manguel understands.

Those of us with many books but little of anything else can tell you the story behind most individual books we have.  Where we bought them and why.  Why we’ve kept them even if we haven’t read them.  Manguel understands that not all books are reading books.  There are reference books.  There are episodic instructional books.  There are books laid up against retirement or incapacitation.  Books for work, books for play.  Books bought to help you prepare for that event that never took place but might, in some remote future, still happen.  Yes, books take up space, but so do pets, furniture, and children.  There’s a cheerfulness to rooms with books, unrivaled even by elegant spaces.

On a recent dentist visit the television was set to one of those shows where a couple is given their dream home.  I’ve watched those before in other waiting rooms and medical facilities and one thing I’ve never seen is a couple saying, “I want a home to fit my books.” And yet those homes with books occasionally make the news and garner thousands of clicks on the internet.  Those of us who are bibliophiles know we’re a minority.  Some of us actually enjoyed those high school reading assignments that so many of our classmates despised.  Our educational system, undervaluing teachers as we do, often fails to inspire the love of reading in the young.  Manguel’s book is for those who were inspired, who remain inspired by books.  Those of us who categorize and move them around.  Take them with us.  Who love them.  The Library at Night is a beautiful book full of wisdom.  It is a love letter to books. Happy National Independent Bookstore Day!

Keeping Categories

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Writing books about movies with a limited budget presents some challenges.  Our subscription to Disney Plus doesn’t really help with the horror genre, but my wife insightfully added Hulu to the package.  Now Hulu isn’t known as a horror streaming hub, but they do have some movies on my viewing list.  The other day I noticed one of their offerings with a title I didn’t recognize.  I  tried searching it on IMDb and came up with nothing.  A bit more research revealed it was an episode of an original Hulu series, mixed in with the horror movies.  The eroding of categories bothers me a bit.  It’s not just Netflix and Hulu and Amazon with movies, but it’s across the board.  I grew up when movie and television were easily distinguished.  Now we live with hybrids.

The same is happening in publishing.  When I sit down to write a book I have a specific end-goal in mind.  Everyone knows what a book is, right?  Well, the future of publishing is all about breaking that down.  Already years ago you could purchase aggregates for classroom use.  These were custom-selected chapters from certain books (electronic, of course) that an instructor could bundle into a “textbook.”  You could mix in articles, blog posts, anything to which you had the rights.  Such a textbook is not a book.  Nobody set out to write it in that form.  It looks like things are moving more and more in that direction.  You’ll be able to purchase just a chapter, or even a paragraph, to use.  Even if the book only makes sense when taken as a whole.

Photo by Hans-Peter Gauster on Unsplash

The electronic era is all about breaking down what civilization took centuries to build up.  Not everything about civilization has been good, of course.  It has been patriarchal, treating women unfairly.  It has been supremacist, treating those less technically developed in horrendous ways.  It has been classist, favoring the rich and their interests over those of the vast majority.  Still, it has left us some good legacies—the book, the symphony, the movie.  Such things have made us better people.  It may be fine to break such things down—who knows?  Maybe it will create more fairness for more people.  It won’t help me, however, when I’m trying to write a book about movies.  You still have to know what counts for each category, even if you have to do so on a budget.

Can You Recall?

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While recently in touch with a colleague I’ve never met, I agreed to send along a filmography of my two horror movie books, Holy Horror and Nightmares with the Bible.  I tend not to read my own books after sending them to the printer.  Defensively it might be that I can say, “I know what I wrote,” but in reality it’s probably more a lack of self-assurance.  Writers often experience self-doubt and although you’ve convinced an editor and an editorial board you may still have your harshest critic to please.  Even though you’ve read the book many times through—at least fifteen each for these two books—you fear you might’ve overlooked something.  So it was strange trying to recall which films I’d actually discussed.  Or how many.

The latter point became clear in a recent review on Reading Religion.  Knowing how I went about piecing together Holy Horror, I’d forgotten just how many movies I watched and rewatched for it.  While it was never intended to be a comprehensive treatment of the Bible in horror (I haven’t seen all horror films), it nevertheless ranges widely.  After having submitted it I continued to watch horror and I continue to find various Bibles in it.  The amazing thing is just how truly widespread the Good Book is as an iconic symbol.  Indeed, I’d been reading about the Bible as an iconic book and that idea took hold in the early days of putting words down for the book.  As an editor I help authors figure out these kinds of issues all the time.  Physician heal thyself.

Even though Nightmares with the Bible just came out over a year ago I couldn’t list all the films off the top of my head.  Sometimes you need reminders.  My books are never discussed at work.  The people I interact with on a daily basis have no interest in them.  In other words, unless I’m having an interview or reading a review, I don’t have much opportunity to think about them.  I’ve moved on to my next projects.  The draft of The Wicker Man has been submitted and I have three promised articles to work on.  Still, I’m trying to settle on the next book.  I seem to have found some acceptance among the horror crowd.  Biblical meteorologists and researchers on Ugaritic goddesses are much less seldom in touch.  Monsters are often mixed forms.  I should know that after watching all these movies.

Write It Down

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Those of us with a bookish outlook often wish we could look things up.  This comes to mind because of a recent documentary I watched, but the thought has occurred many times when visiting museums, particularly for special exhibits.  I’m pretty easily overwhelmed by too much information at once.  In a museum I have trouble reading all the placards and remembering how they tie in because there are so many interesting artifacts to look at.  I leave inspired and impressed and wishing I could look up the information I just read.  I’ve often wondered why museums don’t sell exhibition books that have photographs of the objects with replications of the placards describing what they are.  Maybe it’d just be a market of one, but I’d buy them.

The same thing is true of documentaries.  I’ll readily admit I’m poor with names.  It takes many interactions before a person’s name sticks with me.  (It’s nothing personal, I assure you—it’s just the way my brain works.)  When I watch a documentary I often wish a booklet accompanied it with the names, and credit lines of the interviewees and (because I know this is available on IMDb) a full bibliography.  The books mentioned.  You see, those of us inclined to research enjoy looking things up.  In the case of a long documentary (and that’s only if you subscribe or buy it instead of “renting” it for a one-time viewing) it means having to skim through it all again to reach the information that you could easily look up in a book.  Books are wonderful.

For me, one of the benefits of books is their stability.  Electronic resources change.  When you go to cite a website as a source you have to list the accessed date because things may have changed.  The book on your shelf remains reliably unaltered.  The few ebooks I’ve read come with marks in them.  There’s probably a way of turning this off, but I don’t want to see what other people think is noteworthy.  I suppose it’s supposed to make reading a communal experience.  Reading, in my experience of it, is mostly a private things.  One of the great joys in life is talking about reading with others, whether it’s the same book you’ve read, or a different one.  Why not add to that by making books to go with other species of information-sharing, such as museums and documentaries?  Those of us with a bookish outlook aren’t hard to please.  We just like to have it down on paper.

2021 in Books

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It’s become my habit, on the last post of the year, to think back over the year in reading.  This gives me a chance to give a separate boost to the books I found particularly valuable, for a variety of reasons.  My Goodreads total for 2021 will end up being 70 (two haven’t yet shown up on my page).  It’s easiest to do this by category, so I’ll begin with fiction.  My favorite novels of this past year were Haruki Murakami’s Kafka on the Shore, Stephen Graham Jones’ Night of the Mannequins, Lisa Tuttle’s Familiar Spirit, Hank Green’s A Beautifully Foolish Endeavor, and Christina Henry’s The Girl in Red.  I really enjoyed Joseph Bruchac’s Bearwalk as well, but it’s for younger readers.

For what might be called spiritual memoirs I found Ernestine Hayes’ Blonde Indian remarkable and Heather and Gary Botting’s The Orwellian World of Jehovah’s Witnesses revealing.  Vine Deloria’s God Is Red was stunning.  (It should be clear by now that I read quite a lot from indigenous writers.)  If you count love of books as spiritual I would include Andy Laties’ Rebel Bookseller as well.  As long as we’re on spiritual, books by religion professors might count, so I would add Intimate Alien by David Halperin.  If you count just memoirs, I would also add Follow the Rabbit-Proof Fence by Doris Pilkington.  And if reflective essays count, John Green’s The Anthropocene Reviewed.  And Thich Nhat Hanh’s Love Letter to the Earth.  I learn so much from reading about how others deal with their lives.

Books in the nonfiction category tended toward horror movie analyses (ahem), but some stood out even among the weirdness.  Daniel Ogden’s The Werewolf in the Ancient World inspired me.  Kendall R. Phillips’ A Place of Darkness was a well-written account of early horror movies.  Tanya Krzywinska’s A Skin for Dancing in was insightful and helpful to my research, if difficult to locate.  Likewise Hammer and Beyond by the late Peter Hutchings.  Mathias Clasen’s A Very Nervous Person’s Guide to Horror Movies was fun and informative.  For importance I’d rate Dag Øistein Endsjø’s Sex and Religion at the top.  So much of the world’s conflict is based on these two factors.  It’s difficult to believe that we don’t talk about them and end up fighting and killing over them.  If we can’t talk about it, at least we can read about it.  There are many other books I enjoyed over the year.  Enough that even a brief mention of each would put me over my usual word limit.  (They’re easily found, in any case, by using the “Books” category to the right.) 2021 may have been a challenging year, but books helped me make it through it.

Next Year’s Reading

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One of my year-end rituals, apart from looking back at the past year’s books, is to look ahead for the next year’s reading.  This is such a pleasant exercise because Christmas often comes with gift cards from Bookshop.org or Amazon.  Until this year I’ve used the Modern Mrs. Darcy’s reading challenge to push me into some areas I might not read, but that challenge has now been discontinued.  I participated (this is strictly self-monitored, of course) in six of the seven years that challenge ran, starting in 2016.  Part of each late December was spent in visiting book stores, planning new reading projects, and thinking about the year ahead.  Of course, you can’t predict anything with too much accuracy, but I start the year with a stack of books and a head full of literary dreams.

Also in 2016 I began doing the Goodreads book challenge.  This is merely numerical—you pledge a certain number of books to read in the year.  According to my Goodreads stats (there are some books I don’t publicly admit reading, of course), I’ve read 517 books in the past six years.  Numbers were higher in the commuting days, of course, but I try to read more than a book a week and that practice gets me through some difficult times.  It always looks sunny when planning ahead for a year’s reading, but you never know where the other parts of life will actually take you.  Anyway, this year I’m planning my reading without Mrs. Darcy, mostly culled from my Amazon wishlist, which is unwieldy and constantly growing.  I try to buy the books from Bookshop, however, as it benefits independent bookstores.

This year I may set a slightly lower Goodreads goal.  The main reason for this is that books seem to keep on getting longer.  Novels grow to multiple hundreds of pages but time doesn’t increase in proportion to that number, unless it’s an inverse proportion.  Even with a lower goal I won’t plan on slowing my reading down.  In my commuting days it was fairly easy to read a hundred books per year.  I still tend to get over sixty without those hours on the bus, and hopefully all that reading is doing something useful to the world as a whole.  I write to give back for all the good I’ve been given.  If this in any small measure offsets the headlines that meet us daily, it will have been time well spent.

Salvation by the Book

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I’ve never been to Iceland.  Part of me says that if I ever get to go I’d want it to be on Christmas Eve.  Ah, the light would be in short supply, no doubt, and it would be cold.  But the draw of Jolabokaflod is strong.  Jolabokaflod isn’t a difficult word to figure out, if you’re familiar with Indo-European languages. “Jol” (maybe the “a” is included) looks a lot like Yule.  “Bok” is English book missing an “o” (again, maybe the “a” is part of it).  And “flod,” likewise with another “o” becomes “flood.”  The Yule Book Flood.  The tradition is to give books on Christmas Eve and spend the long hours of darkness reading.  Iceland has the reputation for being a very literate culture.  I’ve read a number of books (in translation) by Icelandic authors.  If there’s ever to be peace on earth and goodwill to all, it will be through books.

If you observe Christmas, today is that great time of anticipation, Christmas Eve.  Churches, whether virtual or in person, will be humming places this day.  Last-minute shoppers will be out and frantic.  Some will be insisting we keep Christ in Christmas while others will be dreaming of sugarplums and fairies.  Some will be tracking Santa on NORAD.  In Iceland they’ll be exchanging books.  Politicians will continue their calculated plotting but I dearly wish they’d spend the day reading instead.  Perhaps there would be fewer tanks at the Ukraine border if those in Moscow would curl up with a good book.  Check the progress of their Goodreads challenge.  Open up the flood-gates and let the books pour in.

There are those who believe this world should be consumed by God’s awful fire, and that right soon.  But God, as I understand it, is a writer of books.  Perhaps the divine plan is different than so many suppose.  Even the angels sang about peace on earth in one of those books.  You never know what’s going to be under the tree, but in our house books are always a certainty.  The words that describe this season—joy, peace, goodwill—can come in a few ounces of paper, ink, and glue.  And if God’s own book tells us to love one another, who are we to argue on Christmas Eve?  And if it’s true today won’t it be true also tomorrow and every other day beyond that?  Iceland has grown out of its warlike past.  And today they’re exchanging books.  Perhaps there’s a lesson there for all of us.

Feeling Used

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It may be perverse of me, but it makes me happy that used copies of all my books can be found on Bookfinder.com.  I discovered Bookfinder many years ago and it is a wonderful site for cash-strapped ex-academics, or anybody who loves books.  There is almost nothing you can’t find here.  Some of the books are very expensive (if they’re rare), but generally you choose the condition you’re willing to accept and how much you’re willing to spend.  The other day I was looking for a research book there and decided to type my own name in, just for fun.  I suppose some authors, having received next to no royalties, might be upset to find themselves on the used market.  For others it’s a kind of validation that their books are overpriced.

I’m a book keeper.  (Not, I hasten to add a bookkeeper.)  If I read a book I want to be able to refer to it again.  That’s one, but not the only, reason I don’t quite trust ebooks.  I’ve had electronics die on me and they can cost many books’ worth of dollars to replace.  Even then you can’t be sure some software upgrade hasn’t deleted the content you paid for.  At least sitting on a shelf you can find an actual book again.  I know some people prefer to read a book and then set it free—a kind of read and release method.  I suspect some folks buy used books just to sell them.  Still, to know that books are available is cause for celebration.  We may survive this after all.  At least our words will.

Bookfinder has been a lifesaver for us independent scholars who don’t have university library privileges or research expense accounts.  The collections of books individuals amass are as unique as the person her or himself.  A family friend was once won, I’m guessing, by visiting us years ago and saying, “You’ve got interesting books on your shelf.”  (In that apartment shelves covered all available wall space in every room except the bathroom.)  Having books around is kind of like having kids.  Some are new, some adopted.  A few you’ve even produced yourself.  They make you glad when they’re around.  Bookfinder occasionally has items that not even Amazon can find.  It doesn’t sell books directly, but puts you in touch with vendors who work with vendors who actually have the goods.  It’s all very complicated but it works.  It actually seems to showcase one of the things the internet does particularly well—puts people in touch with actual books, to be read offline.

Reading Memory

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I recently wrote about writing too much (as if such a thing were possible).  After posting that I thought of how much the same can be said of reading.  I like to believe that whatever I’ve read is stored in my brain somewhere, rather like my writing on all those external drives.  I get some hopeful hints of this when a fragment of something read long ago suddenly reappears.  It’s good to know it’s there somewhere.  What brought this to mind is that a book I’m currently reading used a significant term.  Overly confident as I only am when reading, I figured I’d remember where it occurred.  A few days later I’d forgotten.  “No problem,” I thought, “the index.”  Indexes are never perfect and I’m always amazed by what strikes me as being so important failed to make the author’s cut.  So it happened.

This particular book was compactly written, but even so, it was more than sixty pages ago.  It took a few days of skimming, and finally going through line-by-line to find the word again.  It was a capitalized word and I thought mere skimming would be able to pick it out.  No such luck.  Part of the problem, I suppose, is that since I’ve left academia I’ve pretty much stopped writing in books.  I always did it in pencil, but still—there’s something about that pristine page so carefully typeset and laid out.  Well, if I had all the time in the world I could re-read those first sixty pages again, but I don’t have time to read all the books I need to, so I grabbed my old Pentel and began marking the spots I wanted to remember.

When we age it’s recall that suffers.  I tend to think the memories themselves are still there, sometimes distorted, sometimes altered, but present.  Books, after all, can be reread.  If I read something while commuting to Manhattan, there is a good likelihood that some of it was occluded by the worries of work lying ahead, coupled with the anxiety of catching the bus back home at the end of the day.  Not to mention anything that might’ve been happening in real life—that place outside of work that you really care about.  I’m glad for the commute reading; I regularly read over 100 books a year.  You couldn’t take notes while on a New Jersey Transit bus, though.  It’s not possible to read too much, but reading memory, it seems, is a sometimes a scarce resource.

To Write in Black and White

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It can be seen as a black and white issue: either you’ve written a book or you haven’t.  Many people do write books.  Many more want to.  In a survey I saw sometime in the past few months—I can’t recall exactly where—a survey indicated a high percentage of Americans wanted to write a book.  What exactly does that mean?  There are many different kinds of books and several motivations for writing them.  And, depending, your work may or may not be taken seriously, even if you publish.  As someone who’s published four nonfiction books, all of them obscure, I often think about this.  Working in publishing I have some privileged access to the ins and outs of how this works, but that doesn’t necessarily help in writing success.  So what are the motivations?  Is there any way to tell the difference?

Obviously, I can’t speak for others’ motivations but I can see the results.  Most of the writers with whom I work are academic writers.  Their books are generally written for fellow academics and they’re the result of years of research in specialized libraries often off-limits to non-academics.  Those are pretty easy to tell at a glance.  Another class of nonfiction writer is the journalist.  It’s assumed by the industry that someone who majored in journalism is a talented writer.  If, after reporting on a topic for a few years, a journalist wants to write a book based on experience, that frequently gets a publisher’s interest.  The results may not be academically reliable.  I recall that as a grad student it was assumed there were even certain established publishers not to trust—mainly those that weren’t university presses, but not exclusively.

The self-published book has a more difficult trajectory to trace.  Some authors, no matter how good or insightful, just can’t get a standard publisher’s attention.  Others are convinced of their own wisdom and now have an easy route to become a published author.  Yet others realize some money can be made from writing (although making a living at it is very hard work).  I’ve been reading a book by a journalist that has lots of factual errors in it.  I try not to judge, but I do wonder when I know it’s shelved as nonfiction.  Now, these aren’t the kinds of errors that will cost a life if dosed incorrectly or will set off a war between dominant personalities that are heads of state.  I also know that most books do contain inadvertent errors—books are written by humans and we don’t have all the answers yet.  Still, I think of the readers and how we define nonfiction.  What counts as a book anyway?  Things are seldom black or white.

Writing my first book