These musty tomes meant something to me

This enjoyable meme was passed along by susan at heart in sanfrancisco. When I saw it, I couldn’t resist. It’s all about books, you see and, like so many of you, despite all the revolutionary electronic changes about us, I still like the feel, look, and even smell of pages between covers. Needless to say, the content delights me even more.

Of all the pleasures of life, and there are many, books are still my mainstay, my anchor, my solace at the end of the day, or visiting the john in the morning. I learned to read before I went to school, and essentially taught myself. I guess it came as something of a natural that later I should earn my living via the printed word. I did some work one time with a local literacy organization, and it was beyond my comprehension as to what it would be like to be unable to read.

By the time I could read with some ease, all and everything (well, at least some things) opened up for me. And, from that point, I read voraciously. I remember a conversation with a bunch of young yahoo friends (of sorts) in eighth grade in which I made an observation about something: “How do you know that, Lidster?” one of the unenlightened young urchins asked in a challenging way. “I read it,” I vouchsafed. “Whaddya do, fuckin’ read all the time?” he asked, as if reading was something shameful. After that I was inclined to keep my mouth shut for a while, really until I got to university, at which time it was acceptable to read once again. I kept my mouth shut in the intervening years, as I suggested, but didn’t stop reading.

So, as follows are heart’s questions, as passed onto her by another blogger:

1. How many books do I own? Probably a thousand plus, but I’ve never really counted. I have books I bought last week, and I have books from my earliest childhood, including conventional Beatrix Potter, the Alice books, Winnie the Pooh, and a later much-decried little curiosity from a much more racially stereotyping time, concerning three little black girls and their “Grandmammy.” The girls were known as Rowena, Teena and Tot and they went picking blackberries with the aforementioned Grandmammy.

2. What was the last book read? The Quiet American, by Graham Greene. I’m near the end of it. If you haven’t read it, I recommend it. It offers some excellent insights into the origins of the Vietnam conflict, but in novel form.

3. What was the last book I bought? Difficult to narrow down, since I usually buy more than one at a time, and I love book sales of the sort mounted locally by Friends of the Library and the Rotary Club. The last new book, from a remaindered bin, was Beautiful Shadow: A Life of Patricia Highsmith, by Andrew Wilson. Ms. Highsmith is the ‘troubled’ (to state the case mildly; she makes Carson McCullers look like an advertisement for mental health) author of a number of riveting tales, including Strangers on a Train (filmed by Hitchcock decades ago, and still gripping) and The Talented Mr. Ripley, the consummate study in psychopathic behavior. I rarely read only one book at a time, so the aforementioned have been interspersed with assorted ‘true crime’ tomes, especially those by the brilliant Ann Rule, whose tale The Stranger Beside Me is considered the the definitive study of the evil Ted Bundy.

4. Five meaningful books that I've read:

i. Dr. Zhivago: I read this in my early 20s, around the time Pasternak won the Nobel Prize for literature, but was forbidden by his Soviet overlords to pick it up. It was challenging, and the Russian names were confusing, but at the end of it, it was worth the effort. It’s a brilliant novel, filled with meaning, both human and political,and has a cruel twist at the end. The movie, the delectable Julie Christie notwithstanding, doesn’t really do it justice.

ii. Huckleberry Finn: I have often attested that if a person were to have access to no other writers, he or she couldn’t go wrong with Mark Twain and Shakespeare. HF is a brilliant novel (and not one designed especially for young people, as was Tom Sawyer. It is a study of freedom, and it’s a study of bondage, and Twain shows brilliantly that freedom and bondage are not necessarily what we think they are. It’s also an exquisite expose of a harsh, cruel and corrupt time that, in some regards, isn’t so different from today.

iii. Anything by Shakespeare, but especially the historical plays: I minored in British history, and I am a complete anglophile, and Shakespeare takes me to an earlier time in these studies of power, and the corruption of power. To top it off, the strength of the language is, well, delicious. Especially enchanting to me are the studies of Henry IV and Henry V.

iv. Candy, by Terry Southern: This came out in the 1960s, and it’s a might dirty and obscene little book that is also side-splittingly funny and has never received the accord it should have been given. It’s a spoof of Voltaire’s Candide, but much, much naughtier, but kinda cute in its own way.

v. The Rainbow, by D.H. Lawrence. This book is the precursor to Women in Love and is, to me, a superior vehicle. A study of class conflict, human passion and status in the early 20th Century. Much, much better than the somewhat overhyped Lady Chatterley's Lover, though not quite as bawdy.

OK, this was very difficult. And, each time I put a book down in my list of five, I thought of 10 others. If you are a reader and take on the task, you’ll find the same thing happening. I mean, hell, I didn’t even touch on Dorothy Parker, Evelyn Waugh, Kingsley Amis, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Margaret Lawrence, Kurt Vonnegut, John Updike, Paul Theroux, Bill Bryson, Thomas Mann, and about 40,000 others that come to mind.At the end, I am not going to tag, much as heart didn’t, I am only going to reiterate that if you feel so inclined, please note it so I can read your selections.