I'm out here book buying without any decent restraint, totally beyond the pale
of any acceptable bibliophile conduct. And I am still at home buying tomes.
Well, that and I desperately want A Room of One's Own to be around once the
pandemic subsides. Not being able to browse their shelves really blows. And so I recently found myself running short on bookshelf space.
One thing that exacerbated the problem is that I do not read
e-books. If that's your thing, go for it, I say. If you feel on top of the
world with a tablet full of e-books on it that are all available at the tap of
button, more power to you. It's just not for me. I enjoy the tactile quality of
books, their smell, and find it much easier to go find a section to refer to or
re-read by turning pages rather than scrolling.
My first step in addressing the crisis was to buy a new
bookcase.
I then moved most of my music books over to it since my new
podcast,
Time Enough At Last (you're listening to it, aren't you?), is
music-centric and I thought having all those tomes at my immediate disposal
would be handy.
Now, you may say that having all those books about The
Who/Pete Townshend (there's another one on the shelf below this one) is
overkill. But each has their place, each sheds its own light on the subjects.
Indeed, this was made apparent recently when I was listening to a podcast about
The Who. In it, one of the hosts referred to the "synthesizer loops"
on "Baba O'Riley" and "Won't Get Fooled Again". I found the
term disingenuous, if not wrong, after having read the right most book in this
photo despite what Dave Marsh wrote. You are hearing organs – as played through
a synthesizer – on those songs. I mean, just because you play a guitar through a fuzz pedal,
you don't say you're listening to a fuzz pedal. You still refer to the sound as
being guitar.
The next step in freeing up space was the hardest. I yanked
these off a shelf.
These are the Great Books of the Western World™. Unfortunately,
I only have 59 out of the 60 volumes as I lent out the one with Blaise Pascal's
work back in the late 90s but it was never returned. They are going to be put
in boxes which will be stowed in the attic. It's not that I feel that these
books are unworthy or that long dead white men have nothing to impart to the
denizens of the 21st century. Rather it's because Mortimer Adler and
whoever else at the University of Chicago put the collection together decided that
there would be no annotations. They felt that translations of ancient texts
from 1830 needed no updating and that readers could handle Paradise Lost
and Shakespeare without having any of the allusions explained or defining any
words that might be unfamiliar to (then) modern readers. After all,
"awful" once meant full of awe instead of bad at one point, right?
The meanings of words change over time.
I can't quite dispose of these tomes yet. Maybe someday. For
now, I treasure their sentimental value as they belonged to my father. They are
a way to help me remember some of the good things about him.
On the other hand, I've kept these out on a shelf.
These ten volumes are the Gateway to the Great Books, a
prelude to Great Books. It's a collection of shorter pieces – essays, speeches,
excerpts from lengthier works, et al. Unlike its bigger sibling, the Gateway gives
the reader some context and the readings are often times simpler. The tenth volume,
"Philosophical Essays", is dearest to my heart. It has "
TheMoral Obligation to Be Intelligent" by John Erskine and a clutch of essays
by Francis Bacon. "
On Friendship" was oddly consoling to me when I was
a teenager who had just moved to the middle of nowhere Wisconsin and had no
friends within a 300 miles radius.
"Whosoever is delighted in solitude is either a wild beast or a god,"
it began.
The next step was to remove a boatload of novels from a bookcase.
None of them have been read and they may end up getting shoehorned
back onto a shelf if I enjoy them enough. These are mostly works of experimental/avant-garde
fiction – the top two in the photo are very much indicative of the books below.
I've read many such novels the past few years but rarely do I keep any of them. While
I never regret having read a difficult book, precious few genuinely resonate with me on
more than a surface level. So they are going to sit in front of a shelf until I
start reading from those piles again.
As I was doing my rearranging, I noticed how many of the
books reminded me of a particular time of my life. Here, for instance, is one
of my favorite books of my boyhood.
I loved Richard Scarry! What was the worm's name? Was it
Lowly? There was the story of how somebody's kid got baked into a loaf of
bread. This book is my Rosebud, if you will.
When I moved to Wisconsin from Chicago, I dearly missed
reading The Straight Dope every week.
I think this, the first compilation of Uncle Cecil's columns,
dates back to when I was in the 7th grade. Those of us that had copies were sure to pass it around. My friends and I had
many, many laughs reading this one.
At this time we were all also reading The Hitchhiker's Guide
to the Galaxy as well as playing the Infocom text adventure based on them.
Sadly,
I no longer have the paperbacks of the first three novels but my hardback
copies of the last two books in the series as well as all of the Dirk Gently ones
are all first edition and so I've been lugging them around for 30+ years.
I adore the Riverworld series although it's been many years
since I've read it. Truth be told, I blundered into Philip Jose Farmer's series
by getting the last book first with my decision being based mostly on the cover
art. (So it goes if you are into progressive rock, I guess.)
I remember buying
it while in 7th or 8th grade. The purchase was made at a
bookstore at Six Corners in Chicago. It was a chain, I believe. Maybe a Waldenbooks.
But it was the one I'd swear was on Irving Park, not the hole in the wall
bookstore on Cicero. I think that was a B. Dalton.
Jumping ahead to college, I've kept most, if not all of the
books for Poli Sci 4XX or whatever level it was. I took it my senior year. This
was the second of a two-part examination of liberalism. By this time, the USSR
had dissolved leaving liberalism as the dominant political ideology. I believe
the first course, which I did not take, covered the roots of the liberalism through its manifestation
in the American project. We're talking Hobbes and Locke and Rousseau and
Montesquieu and the Areopagitica and Jefferson and whatnot.
The second course was about modern conceptions and
variations of liberalism. You've got Friedrich Hayek and Milton Friedman with
their rather atavistic calls to embrace a variety that seems more 17th century than 20th.
Then there's Richard Rorty going post-modern. Habits of the Heart by Robert
Bellah, etc. is a timeless look at the tensions of communitarian and
individualistic impulses in American society. Required reading.
Also required reading are the books by my professor, Charles
W. Anderson.
He was a wonderful instructor with a warm, avuncular
demeanor. His lectures were never dry or boring for various reasons including the fact that they were peppered with references to Wisconsin. For instance, one time he was trying to relate one of our texts to Rousseau. Thusly there was talk of the general will as there is when Rousseau is the subject. "But," Prof. Anderson noted, "it's much easier to reach consensus amongst a small group of Swiss people than it would be today in a country of 300+ million. I mean, just imagine a bunch of farmers in Boscobel…".
Plus he knew most of the
people whose books we were reading and so he'd tell stories of arguing with
them at political scientist conventions and such. One of his most endearing
qualities for me was that he was like the
James Burke of political science. I
was fascinated by how he could trace an idea back to its genesis and then up to
the present day and the book we were reading. He'd start in ancient Athens with
one of their proto-liberalistic ideas. Then we'd find ourselves in the Enlightenment
with Locke and Hume putting hammer to anvil and molding a new formulation of it.
Before you know it, Mill is tweaking it and then somebody like John Dewey put
on what you think are the finishing touches. But wait! Rawls intervenes and
throws everyone behind a veil of ignorance. And the debate continues.
I bought this book after dating a woman for a very short
time who was in love with medieval Japanese history and literature. It's likely that I would never have bought a book on this subject if not for her. A neat little reminder of that time.
Lastly here are a bunch of Doctor Who books – Eighth Doctor
Adventures. These are the books I talk about with my fellow DW fans on our
Fiction Paradox podcast. They are not only very much alive today in my literary
diet but they also remind me of the late 90s/early aughts when my roommate and
I would head over to the Borders at East Towne Mall on Sunday mornings. I
remember seeing those books then but never buying any. What a fool I was.
The bonus photo this time is of a couple suggested reading
lists. One is from high school (left) while the other dates back to 7th or 8th grade. I'm a little behind...
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