I'm finding it surprisingly difficult to choose books from the shelves to read. I find myself looking over the shelves thinking, "too intellectual, too dry, too challenging, too..." I finally figured out that the best thing to do is to walk into the room and walk out with a book in my hand in under five seconds.
The second book I grabbed was Joan Didion's After Henry, which I grabbed because I was confusing it with a novel called Henry in Love, which I remembered not being crazy about the first time, so I figured it would be an easy decision to pass it on.
Well, this is not that novel, which I suppose got weeded in some earlier phase. This is a collection of journalistic essays from the late 1980s and early 1990s (the book was published in 1991). It's a good read--if you're curious about the 1988 Dukakis campaign, or Jesse Jackson's, for that matter, or if you want to know what the response was to Patricia Hearst's 1991 autobiography Every Secret Thing.
I am actually not uninterested in such things, and though the Patty Hearst essay was a bit lacking in insight, I enjoyed re-visiting the politics of the 80s, a time in my life when I followed politics closely and was very involved. I was working on a master's degree in political science during the 1988 campaign, so reading these essays helped me nostaligically return to a different time in my life.
Although this book did not turn out to be a novel I hadn't liked that much the first time, it was easy to decide that it was time to let it go. I enjoyed reading it, and Didion is a good journalist, but this book doesn't contain any of her timeless essays, nothing you'd want to re-visit again and again or press into a friend's hands.
My trade paperback copy of After Henry also illustrates one reason I stopped buying so many books, besides realizing how seldom books are worth re-reading: the paper is very poor quality. Seeing how yellowed and brittle the book is, David (a former librarian) guessed that I was reading something published in the 1970s. When I told him it was in fact only a little over twelve years old, he was appalled.
When I was in my teens and early twenties, I had some fantasy of "building a library," and imagined that my book collection would grow forever. But you can only build a library for posterity if the books--as objects--will hold up. Most cheap editions won't, and most books aren't good enough to justify buying high-quality hardcover copies, even if they're published in that form. These days, I leave the library-building to actual libraries.
Rather than simply bag weeded books for donation to the library, my usual practice, I have signed up at BookCrossing so I can release my books "into the wild." I've already registered After Henry and a couple of others, and I released my first book yesterday: feeling slightly sneaky, I left The Bone People on my chair as I left a restaurant. About 25% of released books get reported on back at the website, so as I seed more and more around the greater Lansing area, perhaps I will have the pleasure of learning that someone has picked one up and found it valuable.
Posted by Su Penn at June 18, 2003 07:22 AM | TrackBack