Gardening and Bathroom Lit

You spend so much of your life in bathroom, it's only logical to have decent stash of books to keep yourself distracted.

In a recent article in The Atlantic Wire, Margaret Atwood shared her usual media diet — that is, a complete report of where and when she gets her information during the day. The article had Atwood’s telltale humor and usual sense of derision (“there’s nothing except food and drink that I can’t live without,” she remarks casually, “I take these questions literally”), but what I found interesting is what she had to say about a particular kind of reading we all take part in, but rarely talk about — the one we do in the bathroom. As Atwood defines it, “[b]athroom reading is a certain kind of reading–episodic, but encouraging first thing in the morning. The bathroom is a place where you can go in and pretend to be doing one thing while actually you’re reading. Nobody can interrupt you.”

As Margaret Atwood suggests, I usually keep something episodic or anthologized to read in the bathroom, like a magazine or a short story collection, so that I can savour it a few pages at a time without loosing the thread (unless I’m reading something particularly gripping, or that I need to finish quickly, in which case that follows goes into the bathroom with me). I’ve found Lapham’s Quarterly has done that job wonderfully in the past, because it’s basically a collection of quotations from various sources about a certain subject. By picking up the issue on Celebrity (Winter 2011), for instance, you could be reading a passage from Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar (“Et tu, Brute?”) during one visit to the loo, and an extract from Billy Wilder’s Sunset Boulevard (“Stars are ageless, aren’t they?”) on another.

Recently, however, I’ve been keeping a very special volume at hand: Our Life in Gardens, by Joe Eck and Wayne Winterrowd. The book is halfway between a gardening handbook and a memoir; each chapter is concerned with a particular plant (with beautiful accompanying illustrations by Bobbi Angel) and describes its characteristics and and specific needs, but it also explores any special attachment the authors have to it, like when they started growing it, where they keep it in their garden, and who gave them their first plant. It’s a treasure trove of fascinating trivia about gardening and flowers — especially for someone as poorly versed in the arts of horticulture as I am. For instance, it’s interesting to know that when you eat artichokes (also broccoli and cauliflower), you’re eating the plant’s immature flower buds, or that a biennal is not a plant that flowers every other year, but an annual that takes two years to build up enough root and leaf in order to flower once.

I’ve always found something oddly poetic about botanicals. Maybe it’s the names — both in common and latinized form they sound so beautiful. For example, there’s the “floxglove”, the most common of which is the digitalis purperea, called that way because you will find you finger fits perfectly in one of its cupped flowers. You just have to think of the opening lines of David Foster Wallace’s The Pale King to find an example of a list of plant names used to create mesmerizing lyricism and simple precision. There’s definitely something vague and majestic that relates literature to gardening. Robin Lane Fox, classicist and author of such well-respected books as The Classical World and Travelling Heroes, seems to embody that relation; he has also been the gardening columnist for the Financial Times for the last 40 years. “A thoughtful gardener,” Fox explains in a video tour of his Oxfordshire gardens, “thinks carefully about which plant to choose. She then thinks, where shall I put it? What will it go well with? And she thinks above all: What will it like when its in the garden? And as it develops, she looks at it and thinks of a range of associations; maybe it’s come from a great friend, passed down through the family, maybe it’s connected with paintings, art, poetry that one knows. The plant takes on quite a different dimension to your eye.” For instance, the orange flowers tumbling down the gardens steps aren’t just orange flowers for Mr. Fox; they’re hellenium, the hair of Helen of Troy, who started the Trojan war, and, as a classical scholar, he has to have them there in honour of Homer. Talk about living with poetry.

So you now you see the range of wonderful associations and discoveries opened up by a complete embracing of the art of bathroom lit. Who would’ve thought I could skip from Margaret Atwood’s media diet to great book on gardening? That’s why I highly encourage you to live dangerously and try reading something new and exciting next time you lock yourself in the bathroom. A word of warning, however: you may find yourself staying in it for longer than you wanted to.

Letting Go

"Come on, you can do it! It's for a good cause!"

There are readers who read books and couldn’t care less about the object itself. They are more than happy with library books or e-books or cheap editions that only last one reading before they rip to pieces. What matters for them is the words and the content — the vessel is secondary. Then, there are readers who like to read books, but who also like books in and of themselves, as beautiful objects to be kept, treasured, and shown off. These people tend to buy more books than they read, hoard them greedily, and get rid of them with difficulty. Unfortunately, I am part of the second group. 

In a recent post on The New Yorker’s Book Bench, Elizabeth Minkel wrote a blog post called “How to Give Away your Books”, about actor Ed Schmidt’s one man show My Last Play, which he stages in his living room, and is about him moving on from the world of theatre. As a way to really cut himself off from his theatrical past, his show is also an opportunity for him to give away his entire library of 2,000 books on theatre; each member of the audience leaves with one of his books. This is all very well, but Minkel depicts quite realistically what giving away books feels like to those of us who don’t do it as a kind of existential statement. When life requires that you get rid of some of your books, it’s better that you do it without pondering too much: “If I think too deeply about the books I’m giving away, I have a sort of crisis. It’s got to be like ripping off a band-aid: I give them away quickly, and then I try to forget that I ever owned them.”

I will be leaving Bristol tomorrow after living in the UK for 9 months. During this time, I’ve collected many many books on top of the ones that I brought with me here, and now that I’m packing all of my things in two suitcases and a backpack, I’m faced with a harsh truth: I must give some of my books away in order to bring back those that really matter. I made a little trip to the local second-hand bookshop the other day to drop a few off, very proud of myself for the ease with which I did, but I realized today that I didn’t have as much extra room as I had previously thought. Another give-away trip ensued, and it was much more half-hearted than the first. These are all the books that I’ve had to give away:

-  The Two Cities: Medieval Europe 1050-1320

- The Lais of Marie de France

- The Letters of Abelard and Heloise

- 4 Arden Shakespeares (Much Ado about Nothing, The Winter’s Tale, Henry IV parts 1 and 2)

- Reading in Bed, by Sue Gee

- Alices Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass

- Documents Concerning Rubashov the Gambler, by Carl-Johan Vallgren

- Children of the Revolution, by Dinaw Mengestu

- The Mystery of Edwin Drood, by Charles Dickens

- Chaos and Night, by Henry de Montherlant

- Possession, by A.S. Byatt

- Risky Business, by Al Alvarez

There are too many, although of course I’m bringing many more back with me. If only I had a choice — or rather, if only I didn’t have to make a choice, and just bring them all back. But one must dress, and books are heavy. What’s unfortunate is that I like many (indeed, most) of these books. They were part of my life here; some of them are genuine mementos of my year abroad. It’s truly a shame to have to hand them carelessly to Oxfam.

Selecting the books I was going to give away was an interesting experiment, however. On top of questions of price and space and weight, I had to consider what were the books I would most likely use or read again. To do this, I had to try and project myself into the future as a reader — an enlightening, but also scary, experiment. You may like a book, you may even like it a lot, but does that necessarily mean that you’ll want to have it on your shelf for the rest of your life? Does it mean you are likely to quote from it or lend it to a friend or read it again or write a blog post about it? I’m so afraid of these questions that I’d rather not answer them. It’s more comforting to just have all the books I’ve read about me, within easy reach, just in case. Of course, my limited experience in book-giving has taught me that if you have even the shadow of a doubt as to the necessity of keeping a particular book, that doubt will only grow with time, and chances are that book will be gotten rid of the next time you make space on your shelves. Luckily, there will be no shortage of good, useful books to take its place.
Some books are meant to be read once (and often enjoyed), others are meant to stay with you for life. It’s a question of space. 

As a way to comfort myself throughout this dreary, painful business, I tried to remember that one of the most important thing about books is that once you’ve read them, they’re not only there, printed and bound on your shelf. All is not lost. They’re also here, in your mind, where they continue to exist and thrive.

Reading with Intent

Reading with purpose? Don't just pick up any old book; you've got to choose it carefully.

While it is true that I always know what book I’m going to read next (as if having some kind of hole between books could open up a chasm of non-reading out of which I could never emerge), my choice of books has generally been whimsical. Except for school books, I read what I like, what I think will interest me, what I expect will be good for me, and what trusted friends or reviews recommend. However, I always admire readers who read book with intent, according to some kind of plan, which they set up for themselves and follow carefully, sometimes in the hope that some kind of literary (or other) illumination will ensue. These long-term literary cures seem to be all the rave these days, and countless blogs detail the lives of readers as they lumber through lists of must-read books or calculate the average number of pages per hour (reminding me of A. J. “The Know-It-All” Jacobs, who spent a year reading all 32 volumes of the Encyclopædia Britannica) in order to… well what exactly? Why would you read according to a plan? In order to learn something about yourself by implementing restrictions on what books you read? In an effort to gain sovereignty over your reading habits by setting your own limits? So that you are forced to read stuff you know you should but never get around to? Let’s take a look at a few people who read or have read by design, and see what they’ve gotten out of the experience.

The first type of intentional reading I encountered was Susan Hill’s memoir Howard’s End is on the Landing, in which the author recounts her year of reading “from home” (you can read the introduction here). Hill explains that she has a country home full of books, many of which she hasn’t read, while she has always wanted to reread many others. The solution: Hill locked herself up in her dusty old home for a year and read, refusing to buy new books and minimizing her use of the internet during that time, as a way to get to know her library again, “to repossess [her] books, to explore what [she] had accumulated over a lifetime of reading, and to map [her] house of many volumes”. The idea is interesting, but the memoir she wrote as a result — although I was a very excited about it at first — turned out to be rather uninteresting. Indeed, Hill’s perusing of her bookshelves is a way to recall her past, and to revel in some poorly dissimulated name dropping. The book could by a bibliophile’s dream, a charming account of the pleasures of reading and rereading; it turns out to be the wild fancy of a frustrated old English lady with something to prove. I’m being harsh, but then, I’ve had something against Susan Hill every since her unnecessary rant from last year about being asked to display a short story she wrote anonymously beside stories by other writers, some of them — God forbid! — amateurs.

At least the cover is nice.

On a more human (and certainly less self-indulgent) note, last week saw the long-awaited publication of Tolstoy and the Purple Chair: My Year of Magical Reading, by Nina Sankovitch. As a way to recover from her sister’s death, Sankovitch, after three hectic years, decided to stop and sit and read — one book a day for a year. She is living proof that bibliotherapy works, that there is something fundamentally human and helpful in literature. For Sankovitch, turning to reading allowed her to slow down, to pace her life and find a new center, and, in her own words, “not a way to rid myself of sorrow but a way to absorb it.” The phenomenon of intentional reading is also greatly aided by the internet, whose new platforms urges people to constantly update, to always keep everyone out there posted. Nina Sankovitch therefore decided to blog about her year of reading, writing a review for all 365 of them on her website Read All Day. She’s also very active on Twitter and now writes book reviews for The Huffington Post. I haven’t read Tolstoy and the Purple Chair yet, but it sounds very promising, and since I’m incapable of not getting books about books I will no doubt be reading it soon.

Sankovitch's highly praised grief memoir cum reading diary.

The final reader I wanted to talk about is a recent discovery of mine; I found out about her blog by seeing a picture of her library on a “my bookshelves” picture group on Flickr. This picture immediately caught my attention (and the attention of many other bookshelf-savvy commenters) as, with its rows and rows of glistening, faded penguin covers (orange, blue, green, and the unifying beige stripes), this woman’s bookcase is simply stunning. Her blog is called A Penguin a week, her goal is to collect all 3,000 penguin titles published before 1970 (they’re numbered from 1-3,000, which facilitates the collecting part) and to read and review one of the books each week (she now owns about 1,500 of them). The rationale behind the project is that the only interest nowadays in these old penguin titles is purely aesthetic, for the book design and the history of publishing paperbacks, and while many of these titles are certainly good books, they remain unread because many of them aren’t in print anymore. The blog seeks to give these books a new life and rediscover a number of long-lost, really good books — saving them from the abyss of time. It’s a highly intriguing, laudable project.

Ample proof that books do, indeed, furnish a room (or two).

At the heart of all these purposeful readings is an urge to discover, or rediscover, something that was lost — either in the reader or in what is being read. Perhaps the intentional reader feels that his or her relationship with books has become too whimsical and fleeting. You read a book, and then you put the book down and read another one. For all the time and energy you spent reading and thinking about the first book, once you’ve turned the last page, you move on quickly to something else. What remains? In truth, very little. Perhaps giving a purpose to one’s readings is a way to fit all the books one reads within something more vast, and more lasting. It’s a way to implement order upon the act of reading, a way to keep track and leave traces. As for the blogs and memoirs that emerge from these (apparently life changing) reading experiences, they are definitely a way to break the boundary of solitude which usually rules upon the act of reading; it’s a way of reaching out to the community of readers. That, maybe, is the wider purpose of these journeys: to communicate and instigate more widely an interest in books.