My bedside table is a place where books tend to gather. Some are books I have finished, some are ones I’m currently reading, and a few are those I intend to read but never manage to get to. I just finished Ian McEwan’s bestseller Nutshell. A good book like this would normally migrate to my wife’s table on the other side of the bed. But because she read it first, I took it downstairs to a bookcase of venerable hardbounds. It’s a rare day when we add a new volume to these shelves. Mostly, they lie around the house in neglected piles.
It wasn’t supposed to be this way. When we moved north to retire, we culled the books that had gathered around us for 42 years, keeping only a precious fifth of the original count. It was a long and painful process lasting a full year, but it was interesting as well for what it revealed about what we valued. We vowed in our new life to take books out from the library and to spend less time in bookstores, but addictions never completely disappear.
The table at my bedside is a case in point. There is a copy of Ulysses with a bookmark in the third chapter. A year ago I decided it was time to reread Joyce, and I began by alternating chapters of Joyce with a newer novel until the tug of the new overwhelmed the nostalgia of the old. I haven’t returned to Ulysses for months, but it isn’t a book to ignore. The thickest book on this table is a book of letters written by Robert Frost between 1886 and 1920, and beneath it lies a dog-eared copy of his complete poems. A postcard marks my place half way through the letters, and colorful tabs mark pages with letters that particularly interested me along the way. But I’ve put Frost aside too, confident that I will return.
A second pile includes Shadow Shapes by Elizabeth Shepley Sergeant, a memoir written by a war correspondent about psychological trauma in World War I. She was my great aunt, and her memoir is haunting. It belongs in the bookcase downstairs, but I keep it close so I can re-read a chapter or two when I’m in a certain mood. On top of Shadow Shapes is Go Down, Moses, a book of Faulkner stories that I am re-reading for a winter class, and a paperback entitled The Mark of Athena, a spare copy of an adventure by Rick Riordan that my grandson gave me a year ago to keep up with what he was reading. Finally, there is a box of loose pages, the manuscript of a novel a friend is currently revising.
In Walden, where Henry David Thoreau devotes an entire chapter to the subject of reading, he offers this thought about a famous Macedonian king: “No wonder that Alexander carried The Iliad with him on his expeditions in a precious casket. A written word is the choicest of relics.”
The study where I write is another repository for relics. One wall is shelved with hundreds of paperbacks that I couldn’t bear to part with, predictable volumes for a retired academic of fiction, poetry, plays and non-fiction, some of the latter less predictable. There are loose books as well, stacked on nearly every flat surface including the floor and a couch, dog-eared and underlined books I am using for a current class, and unread books as well, many of them gifts sent to me by friends. There is a new book I bought a few months ago on the Missouri Compromise. The author was a high school classmate, and every time my eyes land on it, I feel guilty that it remains unread.
Why is it that the joy of reading must be tempered with guilt? Why does it often sound like a confession when we admit to others what we are reading? We feel guilty about classics we have never read and guilty about untouched books recommended to us by earnest friends. We feel guilty about the books we have loved and no longer remember well enough to carry on a serious conversation. And I feel guilty about the recent books by some of my favorite authors — David Mitchell, Toni Morrison and Haruki Murakami — that I haven’t picked up. There should be a name for this absurd affliction. Reason should tell us that too many good books are published each year to keep up and that it’s impossible to freshen the memory of all books we have cherished in the past. If we were to read every book our friends recommend, there would be no time for anything else.
So how are we to choose? I have a dear friend who, like Alexander, sticks mostly with the great books that have moved him in the past, re-reading them like sacred texts. That’s one solution. Haven’t we all played that game where we imagine we will be stranded on an island for the rest of our lives, but have time to choose a few books to take along? My friend has turned this game into his daily practice.
But maybe re-reading alone is not the answer. In the end of A Handful of Dust, the satirist Evelyn Waugh strands his hero in the Amazon jungle, prisoner to an illiterate madman who miraculously has a complete set of the works of Charles Dickens. The hero’s fate is to read Dickens aloud to his captor for the rest of his life, volume after volume, again and again.
I think there is a simpler metaphor to help me with my dilemma. I learned from a woodsman how to distinguish the snowy footprints of a coyote from an ordinary dog by the straight line the wilder creature walks. Coyotes focus on what needs to be done while dogs are more whimsical. Immediately I saw this phenomenon at work the next time I walked in the woods with my dog Lucy. She was infinitely curious, veering from the main path in random loops, following scents and picking up every stick and piece of bark that she found interesting. She knew that the purpose of walking was pleasure and that at the end of the day there would be a bowl of food for her at home. This seems to me a good model for choosing what to read. I should just follow my nose and see where it takes me, and for the books I never get to I should feel no more remorse than Lucy.
Jonathan Stableford lives in Strafford. He can be reached at jon.stableford@gmail.com.