I have books everywhere. Stacked on tables, perched on chairs, forgotten on couches, scattered on beds, piled up on the floor. They seem to rest undisturbed on any available surface. Even on bookshelves, of all places. I’ve been in homes where bookshelves were used to keep objects and bottles and picture frames, but not books. (I’ve also been in homes where bidets were used to stack magazines, but that’s a subject for another essay.)
Books, I was saying, are a ubiquitous presence in my home. A reassuring, comforting presence. Like house cats that move everywhere silently and softly, blending seamlessly with the ambiance. They’re there, and they aren’t. Sometimes I try to imagine what my place would be like if I could make all the books disappear with a finger snap. But I can’t picture inhabiting a place without books. I know how I’d feel, though: probably lost, maybe sick. Certainly naked. Stripped of the bare essentials. It’d be like suffocating, gasping for air. As if I were trapped in a sealed room, with no doors or windows, or air vents. Because that’s precisely what books are -- escape conduits. Portals to parallel lives, adjacent universes.
Every now and then my mind wanders to all the books still packed away in boxes, I don’t even know where. Books from other periods of my life that I’d love, one day, to retrieve. I’ve been saying this for years, but never acted. I’ve also been saying for years that I want to build a database of all the books I own. A database with all the relevant info, including the actual location of each book. Finding a title in my bookshelves is starting to become a problem. This coming weekend I’ll start with the database, I’d think. Maybe I’ll have the kids help me. But nothing ever happened. I often catch myself staring at a bookshelf for a long while, hoping that my eyes stumble upon the book I’m looking for. But when scanning through the spines, I invariably get distracted, and end up abandoning the search and pulling out something else.
One of the few real constants in my life is that I’ve always bought books. I buy lots of books. I spend hours at bookstores, but I buy books on a whim, impulsively, for the most part. With embarrassing nonchalance. I buy books when I hear about them; I buy books because I know the author; I buy books because I like their cover (yes, I judge books by their cover); I buy books because I like the font they’re written in and their page format and the line spacing and several other insignificant things that are important to me. And I buy books for a host of other random reasons.
Like that time I was selected for Jury Duty, many years ago, and every morning for several months had to take the same tram to the Courthouse. One of such mornings the cover of a book that someone seated in front of me was reading caught my attention, and I got intrigued. So I bought it, and I read it every day on that tram on my way to and from the Courthouse, until I finished it. Another morning I saw someone else whose book had a cover that I liked, and I bought it and read it like the first one, every day on that same tram. And I did the same with a bunch of other books that I now remember as “the Books of Jury Duty”.
The amazing thing with the Books of Jury Duty is that I loved all of them. They were bought solely on the basis of their titles and visual features, and read exclusively on the tram during that half hour trip to and from the Courthouse. So one hour in total every day, excluding weekends, for about six months. None of them I immediately dismissed as uninteresting, or uncaptivating, or simply bad -- a sort of zero tolerance approach that I usually apply just a few pages into a book. But now that I think of it, there was another criterion that I employed to decide whether to buy the Books of Jury Duty, besides their title and appearance. It was the facial expression of their readers, how immersed in their experience they seemed to be with their eyes on the page, as well as their posture and general demeanor.
There was this middle aged lady, I remember quite vividly, who was reading a book by Roberto Bolaño titled “Puttane Assassine” (literally, Murdering Whores, but I’m not sure this is the official English title). It was snowing outside, and she was wearing a purple turtleneck. She had well-defined cheekbones and sleek, black hair neatly gathered into a bun. Behind thickly rimmed glasses, her eyes radiated a welcoming warmth, conveying a sense of serenity. Probably in her early sixties, her slender figure and composed posture betrayed a past as a teacher, or literary connoisseuse. She would read a couple of pages, close the book keeping her index finger as a signpost, look up, take off her glasses, think for maybe a minute, produce a hint of a smile, put her glasses back on, re-open the book, and continue reading. I observed her discreetly, looking away whenever she paused.
I had no idea who Roberto Bolaño was, but now I’m glad I took that tram ride that morning, a couple of decades ago, and got intrigued by the combination of title, author (I’ve always been attracted to South American writers), and reader appearance. I went ahead and bought the book that very day, without even researching what it was about first, or who the author was, and discovered a whole mysterious universe of supreme prose and storytelling and exquisite literary craft and fascinating history that made me fall in love with Bolaño and read everything he wrote. Beautiful things happen when you’re open to making them happen.
One morning a young fellow with a head full of dreadlocks was reading “Ghiaccio-Nove”, the Italian title of Cat’s Cradle by Kurt Vonnegut, I discovered later. He was seated next to me, and seemed very much captivated, and amused, by whatever his eyes were on. So much so that, when he finally lifted his gaze from the book to check where the tram was at, he realized he had missed his stop. Right there, I was sold. I bought the book in a little store across the street from the Courthouse, and fell in love with Vonnegut too. I remember I was seated in Court, attending my duty, but thinking about whatever I would continue reading on my way back, later in the afternoon.
As I’m trying to wrap up this piece, I’m thinking that every book tells two stories: one narrated in it, contained in its words, and one about the circumstances leading the reader to it. The former is, by definition, fixed, immutable for everyone. The latter is unique to each of us.
Maybe I will explore this idea a little further, one day. And maybe, when I finally build that database, I will include a few words on how each book and I met.
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"It was the facial expression of their readers, how immersed in their experience they seemed to be with their eyes on the page, as well as their posture and general demeanor." What an act of faith in humanity, to observe and note another person's relationship to a book as a means of choosing what to read next. Never heard of anyone doing this. Of course verbal recommendations by friends are one thing, but following and trusting the body language of a stranger immersed in a book, that's quite another.
My database is far from complete but one of my most loved bits is connecting a book with the person who recommended it to me or how I discovered it.
Well done yet again my friend. I eagerly await the published collection of your works.