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.

Of Titles

Michel de Montaigne. His titles were bit repetitive, but at least they were straightforward.

Like a book, a blog needs a title — and preferably a good one.

A good title, of course, is a complicated thing. It has to reveal something about the content without saying too much, it has to be easily remembered without being obvious, and it has to sound smart without being obscure or pedantic. Titles for smaller works — a single blog post, an essay, a short story — are probably easier to find because they are headers for a more narrow field of inquiry. Influential essay writers like Montaigne or Francis Bacon solved the title by problem several centuries ago by taking the subject of their text and slapping the word “Of” before it: “Of Sleeping”, “Of Moderation”, “Of Fear”, “Of Travel”, “Of Drunkenness”, and so on.

Titles for longer pieces of writing or collections are trickier, because they have to encompass a sometimes very broad array of subject matters. Short story collections, like CDs, often reuse the title of one of the stories (or songs) comprised within it as the title of the whole. Alice Munro, for instance, has done this for virtually all of her short story collection; and since she has a knack for good titles, the result is usually excellent,

When a title's that good, you don't even need an image on the cover.

like Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage or The Moons of Jupiter. Or else, like Annie Proulx, they use a title that fits in some way with the general trend of all the stories, and add an ugly, literal subtitle underneath just to make sure you know exactly what the book is about: Close Range: Wyoming Stories, Bad Dirt: Wyoming Stories 2, Fine Just the Way It Is: Wyoming Stories 3.

Some books have really good titles. They make you want to read them, they make you feel connected to the book before you’ve even picked it up. Some of my favorites are Flaubert’s Parrot by Julian Barnes, One Hundred Years of Solitude, Nineteen Eighty-Four, Varieties of Exile by Mavis Gallant, Risky Business by Al Alvarez, Somewhere Towards the End (Like Alice Munro, Diana Athill always has beautiful titles for her books: Instead of a Letter, Stet, Yesterday Morning, Don’t Look at Me Like That)… Other books have not so good titles: Ian McEwan’s latest book Solar, Annie Proulx’s The Shipping News, Jonathan Franzen’s Freedom, 2666 (You can’t say this one without sounding like a you have a speech impediment), … I’m not entirely sure why I don’t like them, I just find they sound bland, or obvious. It has nothing to do with the books themselves; and to be fair, there are some much worse book titles out there. All genres considered, I think the worst is probably The Duchess, her Maid, The Groom, & Their Lover, an erotic novel by Victoria Janssen — although Carlton Mellick III’s The Haunted Vagina is definitely up there. Tangentially, I’d like to add that I tend not to like books that are entitled after their main characters. I really find it’s the least creative way to name your novel. For instance, Dickens’ working title for Little Dorrit was Nobody’s Fault — imagine how much better that would’ve been! Using a protagonist’s name as the title of a book also frustrates me because, unless your character becomes embedded in pop culture (like David Copperfield or Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn), then it’s sometimes very difficult to tell which name on the book cover is the author’s and which is the title — take the Pulitzer-winning Oliver Kitteridge, by Elizabeth Strout.

Probably the worst book title in history.

Hemingway, as the compulsive perfectionist that he was, unsurprisingly spent a long time deciding on the titles for his books. When he had finished writing something, he would sit down and come up with a list of possible titles, and the select the best one. His technique seemed to work well, since he came up with some of the most memorable titles of the 20th century, like The Old Man and the Sea, The Sun Also Rises, and The Snows of Kilimanjaro. I inspired myself somewhat from Hemingway’s method in finding the title for this blog. I had a brainstorming session with my girlfriend in which we came up with some very bad ideas (Logophagist, Alphabetist, The Reading Lamp) and some rather good ones (Bibliology; or The Science of Book-Loving, I’d Rather Be Reading, BookLust). The title we finally chose, Book’s End, emerged as a world play on a “book end”, the staple of every bibliophile’s wall shelves (lest his books fall off and get damaged… and maybe also hurt someone).

I wanted this blog to be first and foremost a place, a kind of haven where readers and book lovers could go to, get informed, and participate in a conversation about literature and books in general. Book’s End is that place, like a dead end (except very much alive) for bibliophiles and bibliomaniacs and “bibliologists”, and casual readers too. Book’s End is also a specific reminder that books do, indeed, end. Luckily, you can always pick up a new one (or an old one) afterward and keep on reading. In a broader sense, the title is also a warning, in the age of Internet, Amazon, GoogleBooks, and E-Readers, that the “Book” as we know and define it — a concept and an object which so many of us still cherish very strongly — is changing very quickly indeed.

And so, let the book-blogging begin!