I just completed an essay for a newsletter about books we never read, but it is assumed, because we are Readers, we have. Catcher In The Rye is such a book for me. Never read it. Know a lot about it, through some kind of osmosis, rubbing up against people who have read it. You can glean a lot that way.
I made the statement in the essay that I probably don’t even own a copy. I just checked. I do. It’s not actually mine, the name of the person who apparently loaned it to me is stamped inside the front cover. But there it is, on my shelf. Accusing me. “You never read me, but I won’t go away until you do!”
Some books, I think, are alive. They find their way, by many avenues, into peoples’ hands. Some of us never seem to have to purchase these books, they just show up. They’re always there. This is one of them.
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance seems to be another. We have never been without a copy in this house, though we have never bought one. I haven’t read it. Read in it, sure. Open at random, do a few pages, close and reshelve. I’ve got a few books like that. But I never paid for a copy. How did it get here? And by “it” I mean the book itself, not just one singular copy.
We used to give books away. We’d buy them for people and hand them out. I did that for Time Enough For Love once, I bought ten copies and just passed them to friends.
What other books just seem to follow you around? I suppose it depends on what kind of people you hang with. I know people who have never bought The Lord of the Rings, but they have it, and have read it. (Yes, I bought my copies, but there was one set of them passing among my friends at one time. Wonder where that ended up?)
For years I had a tattered copy of To Kill A Mockingbird that arrived in my collection one day from where I do not know and stayed there. I finally bought an anniversary edition hardcover of it and the paperback has subsequently disappeared. Moved on, I suppose, to some other needy shelf.
When I say books live, this isn’t exactly what I have in mind, but it is kind of freaky. I’ve never actually caught my books having relations and reproducing, but several years ago I discovered four full editions of The Foundation Trilogy. Â
Occasionally, I know where these copies come from, but it is also true that many of them have just shown up, like unemployed people looking for work. “Will Tell You A Good Story For a Warm Shelf for the Night.” I’m looking at my shelves now and I see a copy of Lost Horizons that I did not buy (or borrow). Likewise a copy of Dr. Zhivago. That one baffles me. Why would they pick my library in which to seek refuge? Who passed the word to them that they’d be safe here?
Well, it’s true, I won’t turn them out. Who knows, I may even read them. Maybe not Catcher In The Rye, though. I’m kind of holding out on that one. It’s the kind of book everyone thinks you really must read, that I’ve got my back up about it. Obviously, it thinks I should read it, but it slipped in here on the sly, probably in company with a few others (like the volume on Chinese Philosophy that I cannot imagine the origin of) and thinks it will taunt me into cracking it open.
We’ll see about that.