Books

I happened on this cartoon the other day, and I laughed, of course:

But seriously: that pile of unread books is so amateur! Here's mine—or rather, one of mine: I have many.

And to be fair, the stacks of books on the right
are ones I have read. I do, in fact, read...

The other day a friend wrote a blog post about how he no longer reads actual books, he does all his reading on a device. I admire the spareness, but... I just... can't. I love holding a book. I love admiring the cover art, which I get to reabsorb every time I pick the book up. I appreciate the choice of font, including size and leading, all of which influence the length of a book. (My preference: short.) I love attaching sticky-flags to passages I especially admire—or in the rare case of a book that has such passages every page or two, I love writing in books: underlining and marginaliaing. I have a habit of noting new-to-me words on the last blank page of a book (most recently: bécasse, aka woodcock, and ormolu, a sort of gilding—these in a mystery set in the Périgord region of France, review upcoming). 

But. I am now considering moving out of the country, and putting only the most necessary items (such as furniture) in storage. Are hundreds of books actually "necessary"? No. As my friend points out, you can carry thousands of books with you on your iPad. 

An entire library on a slim device. It boggles the mind.

I will most likely not reread any of the hundreds of books I've read and still possess, or even look at the many flags. But still: they feel like friends. They remind me of time well spent, of knowledge gleaned, of mysteries solved and questions asked and, very often, answered, in one way or another. 

This evening I considered purchasing a few new books that I definitely want to read: Richard Powers's Bewilderment, Michael Pollan's This Is Your Mind on Plants, Adam Grant's Think Again: The Power of Knowing What You Don't Know. The only title I did purchase, I purchased on Kindle: Brad Kessler's North. I would really rather read it as a physical book, but... I also want to (try to) transition. Now I just need to remember that it's there, on Kindle. I need to create a new habit, I guess you could say. Brad will be my test case. (He was an instructor in my MFA program, though I didn't work with him. He wrote the beautiful Birds in Fall and delightful Goat Song. I am very curious about this new book.)

Anyway, here are a few photos I've shot over the years of books, singly or multiply.