Better Read Quickly
Bookstores and oceans both seem to have limitless horizons. I love brick and mortar bookstores because of all the accidents I have there. I go in looking for a mystery and come out with a history. I go in looking for one book and find seven. Oops, I didn’t mean to do that.
On Amazon there is far less chance of straying into a different genre. I leave their site having touched far fewer books, having had far fewer imaginative thoughts, than if I had spent the same time in an actual store. And then the mind percolates on the drive home. Scenes write themselves, characters say things.
Libraries are the same. And immensely cheaper.
I’m married to an English teacher. (Fifty-one years!) We have twenty-five bookshelves in the house, many double stacked. Much of it came from my father’s library: OLD Sci-Fi pulps, the James Bond books in first edition paperback, hardcover “best sellers” written right after WWII, Churchill, Dos Passos, Hemingway.
I’ve tried to make a point of read everything we have. No way. Some is not “great” literature. Some is horribly overcome by events. (Thomas Dewey on the potential for the Pacific copyright 1947) But I’d best enjoy it while I can. They were burning books they didn’t like last summer in Portland. Many of the ones on these shelves would make their list as racist. Jack London champions his race. Hemingway make racial distinctions. Melville and Twain use words they wouldn’t like.
They burned Bibles too.
I’d best enjoy my books while I can.
