I've been enjoying A Book Addict's Treasury (Rugg & Murphy, 2006) for the second time through. It's yet another of those collections of excerpts, bound in pale paper with simple fonts for the title; but this one is actually quite good – intelligent passages, well chosen, many surprises, really just a lot of very well-chosen, well-written words. Unexpectedly good, actually, as it's not edited by famous people or published by a major publisher – the editrices (?) live in York, rather near here. (This is completely unlike, for instance, the apparently similar but vastly cheesier, and badly edited, The Literary Companion of 2004; which not only reads as though some idiotic publisher's accountant told an underling to go slap together a salable book imitating Schott, but which actually has – horrors – errors of fact in it.)
Some chapters include many descriptions of people's libraries – or of libraries, generally, or of books, etc. Since I've lived in too many different places, and since this particular apartment is unusually pleasant, it makes me feel as though I want to describe my books – to myself, if to no one else; so that I don't forget.
After all, though I can remember the charming small garden apartment in San Francisco, on Collingwood; the amazing hillside apartment there that I had for only a year; the large, dusty but comfortable place I shared with Paul P. for some years in Los Angeles; and also the rather grand Hong Kong apartment that the University gave me – although all those places were fairly pleasant, it's hard for me to remember just what books were where, how the books went. In all the rooms I've lived in since college, there were shelves of books; but since I don't have a very good memory (a result, I think, of being a book person – things vanish from memory when you live by the page, just as becoming a good sightreader makes musicians poor at memorizing) I don't exactly remember how things were in those places. I know that the Los Angeles apartment had a large kitchen, and there were books and papers tucked into odd corners of my rather small bedroom; but I can't quite picture the whole thing – or at least not without a vague sense that it must have looked bizarre and possibly pathetic to others.
But this apartment is fairly presentable. Acutely IKEA-cized, full of Billy and Benno shelves, practically the entire thing is beechwood. The front room, which includes a rather unfortunately multi-colored sofa that has become increasingly lumpy, and an intimidating array of consumer electronics in black metal, is a sort of nerve center for the apartment – all the basic literature on four and a half sets of shelves, plus poetry. And half of the mass-market paperbacks (they have to have their own specially made miniature shelves, otherwise they would waste too much space – nine shelves where the other bookcases only have six), and all the DVDs, and in some corners a few of the videotapes.
All that 'basic literature' is – well, what is it? Lots of novels, essays, some scattered 'nonfiction' (such a bizarre category that is). It's basically the things that don't fit well into the more subject-oriented sections, most of which are in the middle room, which includes my desk – which are, mostly: philosophy/culture/semiotics; plays and scripts; books on AIDS; reference (with travel guides, books on writing, books on languages); and a few smaller subject areas, such as psychology, media, etc., although the latter keep getting pushed into the storage room (a disaster that need resolution – there is at least another bookcase worth of books stacked precariously in there among the boxes, that need to be on a shelf somewhere).
So: call it 'everything else'; – but since this is my own library, and I don't like everything that is published (unlike some of the more manic bibliophiles), there are strong threads running through even the 'everything else': lots of science fiction (this whole area has been revived in the past five or six years by Gollancz's Fantasy Masterworks and Science Fiction Masterworks series, which have given me a fairly dependable way of buying good science fiction/fantasy without bothering with all the horribly written three-volume messes that drag the field so far down); lots of novels, generally of an experimental, formalist, or bizarre cast (I'm not very interested in people's Personal Stories™ – I vastly prefer peculiar ideas, structures, and sentences that attract attention to themselves; it's no accident that, of famously difficult books, I still respond to Joyce's Ulysses with great affection, having read it in 'independent study' in high school).
One unfortunate problem of some of those novels: being as most of them are very twentieth-century modernist (okay, Sterne excepted), they tend to be rather bleak. As I've mentioned before in this blog, after some of the disasters that hit me in the late 1990s and early twenty-first, I became seriously unwilling to read depressing novels for a long time. That made reading tricky – practically any novelist tries to create conflicts that put characters in miserable positions, and it's exactly that misery that put me off for some years; many books didn't get finished because I just couldn't face the predicaments of the characters, not on top of my own.
A complicated example, but one that I managed to finish, was Nabokov's Ada; probably the longest and most realistic of his mature novels, it races along for nearly half its length when Van, Ada and Lucy are young and full of ideas (and certain other things of course, as you would know if you read it); then it slows as the characters get older, and gets immensely dull and turgid, sort of dimly lit for hundreds of pages. But I remember the startlingly ecstatic realization, towards the end, that fighting my way through the second half was absolutely and amazingly worth it: the abrupt but graceful tragedy of Lucy's choices and the aged clarity of the last pages could only have the power they have if you'd fought your way through the rest of it.
So: hard books are often worth reading. Sometimes not, of course; when I got through M. John Harrison's Light last year (intellectual British science fiction), which took some work because of the density of the concepts involved, I remember thinking: meh – a rather weak and simplistic ending to a hugely complex set of problems. Oh well, it happens. And of course there are all those modernist novels that are so cynical, so caught up in a dark network of cleverness, that you just know without finishing them that everyone will lose in the end (Gaddis, Burgess, Broch's Sleepwalkers). Frankly, who needs misery, especially when won at such great cost?
Okay, more when I feel like it. An endless topic: like a list of Sei Shonagon's that can just go on and on and....
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