Dear You,
You probably know that I buy my books more often than I ever get them from a library. When I have a couple of disposable dollars, I like to go to Borders or Barnes & Noble, and my favorite finds are on the remainders tables, where I can get a fat hardbound that cost $25 or more for only four or five or six bucks.
It makes it all the easier to give them away. http://www.bookcrossing.com/ has helped me in my enterprise, and I recommend it to you. For the record, if you'd care to look at the books I've read since joining, I'm "Manomet," a name I chose from the town where I owned a vacation home for 20 or so years.
The Random Acts of Kindness aspect particularly calls to me. I like the anonymity, the serendipity. But even I was surprised when my wife, traveling home recently and on a layover at JFK airport was handed a Dick Francis novel from a fellow sitting nearby. All I know is that he'd bought something in Dulles, Virginia that morning and a bottle of Guiness at JFK four hours later -- that from the two sales receipts he'd kept in the book for page markers. Instead of lugging the finished book onto the next airplane, he passed it along . . . and it got to me.
So, of course, I'm passing it along to you, in a sense. If you check my BookCrossing site for Dick Francis' Longshot, you can learn where I have left it.
Finder's Keepers . . . unless you, too, give it away.
Showing posts with label books. Show all posts
Showing posts with label books. Show all posts
Thursday, July 17, 2008
Saturday, March 22, 2008
Porches
Dear You,
The rain this early afternoon came while I was sitting on my porch reading a novel my guest left behind. The lanai, as it is known here, has a metal covering, and the sound drew me away from the scene of the crime in my story and, within a moment, transported me up the Atlantic coast 1,403 miles to another porch and another time.
I spent only a short time each Summer on the porch in Manomet, MA. Those days, like the house itself, no longer exist -- the house, unlike my memories of it, have been bulldozed and carted to a landfill.
Memories, I think, are a sort of landfill, too. More easily mined, sometimes, for the treasures we bury there. In the case today, I closed my eyes and back I went, lying on one of the spare beds, a book nearby, listening to the rain strike the rubber roof and watching the reflection of myself in the windows that had been swung open and hooked to the rafters.
I was transported, and with a great sense of longing had to pull myself back here to March 22 in Florida. Back to the scene of the crime.
The rain this early afternoon came while I was sitting on my porch reading a novel my guest left behind. The lanai, as it is known here, has a metal covering, and the sound drew me away from the scene of the crime in my story and, within a moment, transported me up the Atlantic coast 1,403 miles to another porch and another time.
I spent only a short time each Summer on the porch in Manomet, MA. Those days, like the house itself, no longer exist -- the house, unlike my memories of it, have been bulldozed and carted to a landfill.
Memories, I think, are a sort of landfill, too. More easily mined, sometimes, for the treasures we bury there. In the case today, I closed my eyes and back I went, lying on one of the spare beds, a book nearby, listening to the rain strike the rubber roof and watching the reflection of myself in the windows that had been swung open and hooked to the rafters.
I was transported, and with a great sense of longing had to pull myself back here to March 22 in Florida. Back to the scene of the crime.
Wednesday, July 25, 2007
Bleak House
Dear You,
Why do you suppose that fictional representations of the future are so often bleak? As I continue my current read -- one of my "beach books," my term for light reading -- I keep thinking of other novels. This one is a thriller set a half-century hence, the murder victims getting their comeuppance because of their Frankenstein-like efforts to create beautiful and intelligent young women.
Why do so many writers imagine an Orwellian future in telling their stories? Were they influenced by Huxley's "Brave New World" of over-population and genetics experiments? Orwell's "1984" of perpetual war and Big Brother surveillance? The list is much longer than I want to note here, and that's not even touching recent as well as classic movies. Like millions of others recently, I got the seventh and last Harry Potter book, and I notice in the early chapters how different are the tone and characters and plot compared with those first installments. Harry has "grown up" and his future is grimmer than his past. So goes the world, apparently!
My only reference here comes from comparing my life with that of my father's -- child of the Great Depression and wounded veteran of World War II, struggling for so many years to achieve the American Dream . . . which I inherited and too often take for granted. I imagine the future to be better and better. Even so, it certainly is entertaining to visit a much darker world in my reading.
Why do you suppose that fictional representations of the future are so often bleak? As I continue my current read -- one of my "beach books," my term for light reading -- I keep thinking of other novels. This one is a thriller set a half-century hence, the murder victims getting their comeuppance because of their Frankenstein-like efforts to create beautiful and intelligent young women.
Why do so many writers imagine an Orwellian future in telling their stories? Were they influenced by Huxley's "Brave New World" of over-population and genetics experiments? Orwell's "1984" of perpetual war and Big Brother surveillance? The list is much longer than I want to note here, and that's not even touching recent as well as classic movies. Like millions of others recently, I got the seventh and last Harry Potter book, and I notice in the early chapters how different are the tone and characters and plot compared with those first installments. Harry has "grown up" and his future is grimmer than his past. So goes the world, apparently!
My only reference here comes from comparing my life with that of my father's -- child of the Great Depression and wounded veteran of World War II, struggling for so many years to achieve the American Dream . . . which I inherited and too often take for granted. I imagine the future to be better and better. Even so, it certainly is entertaining to visit a much darker world in my reading.
Wednesday, July 18, 2007
Booked Solid
Dear You,
By my rough calculation my brothers and I collectively have been reading books for over a century and a half. We read voraciously -- have done so since we learned how. I noticed that habit again on my recent visit with them. When nothing else beckons, we reach for a book, and a book is always within reach. We have devoured them by the hundreds.
My current book concerns the 1854 cholera outbreak in London -- The Ghost Map. A friend lent me her copy, and I expect quite a few others will read that copy . . . and its clones . . . before it joins other titles down the River Styxx of memory. I love the way my friends and acquaintences think of me when they finish reading something they have enjoyed. I love the way a library card opens the door to a myriad of books wherever I go. I love BookCrossing (it's online!) to see what others are reading, so that when I paw through the remainders tables at Borders or B&N I can do more than "judge a book by its cover" that I've spotted for $3.95 And of course I love yard sales, where I've purchased an entire box of books for a couple of bucks.
So there we were in northern Michigan, my brothers and I, talking about books along with all the other things we have in common. If "reading maketh a whole man," then we were certainly being wholly ourselves.
By my rough calculation my brothers and I collectively have been reading books for over a century and a half. We read voraciously -- have done so since we learned how. I noticed that habit again on my recent visit with them. When nothing else beckons, we reach for a book, and a book is always within reach. We have devoured them by the hundreds.
My current book concerns the 1854 cholera outbreak in London -- The Ghost Map. A friend lent me her copy, and I expect quite a few others will read that copy . . . and its clones . . . before it joins other titles down the River Styxx of memory. I love the way my friends and acquaintences think of me when they finish reading something they have enjoyed. I love the way a library card opens the door to a myriad of books wherever I go. I love BookCrossing (it's online!) to see what others are reading, so that when I paw through the remainders tables at Borders or B&N I can do more than "judge a book by its cover" that I've spotted for $3.95 And of course I love yard sales, where I've purchased an entire box of books for a couple of bucks.
So there we were in northern Michigan, my brothers and I, talking about books along with all the other things we have in common. If "reading maketh a whole man," then we were certainly being wholly ourselves.
Sunday, July 8, 2007
Turning Leaves
Dear You,
While on a whale-watching excursion out of Plymouth, Massachusetts, several years ago, I observed at the back of the vessel a man flanked by two boys, each engrossed in a paperback book. Since they were dressed similarly and bore resemblances to each other, I took them for father and sons. We had been out of sight of shore for over an hour already, with another hour to go before reaching the Stellwagen Banks, where the whales most likely were to be seen.
I looked around at the other passengers -- some in quiet conversation, others fiddling with camera equipment, quite a few with portable listening devices and nodding or tapping to music flowing from headsets, and not a few who were just staring at the vacant seascape. Here and there was someone else looking at print: the tour brochure, a magazine . . . but I saw only those three with books. In the years since, I have observed this same situation in a variety of public places.
How to explain this loss of the habit of reading? (An exegesis, no doubt, too lengthy for this space!) Kosinski called Americans a "nation of videots" and Mencken sneeringly invented decades earlier "Boobus Americanus." If those who are ignorant of history are doomed to repeat it, I think those who aren't readers cannot be very good citizens -- certainly not in a democracy, which can be sustained only by people of reason.
I think of those three readers afloat in the Atlantic, just a few years before their fellow Americans -- those who managed to get to the polls at all! -- voted into office a man who can scarcely read his own teleprompter, and who, with little sense of, and no regard for, history, has so damaged our country that it will be years undoing him if at all. Incredibly, We, the People, returned to the polls and elected him again!
Wasn't anyone reading?
While on a whale-watching excursion out of Plymouth, Massachusetts, several years ago, I observed at the back of the vessel a man flanked by two boys, each engrossed in a paperback book. Since they were dressed similarly and bore resemblances to each other, I took them for father and sons. We had been out of sight of shore for over an hour already, with another hour to go before reaching the Stellwagen Banks, where the whales most likely were to be seen.
I looked around at the other passengers -- some in quiet conversation, others fiddling with camera equipment, quite a few with portable listening devices and nodding or tapping to music flowing from headsets, and not a few who were just staring at the vacant seascape. Here and there was someone else looking at print: the tour brochure, a magazine . . . but I saw only those three with books. In the years since, I have observed this same situation in a variety of public places.
How to explain this loss of the habit of reading? (An exegesis, no doubt, too lengthy for this space!) Kosinski called Americans a "nation of videots" and Mencken sneeringly invented decades earlier "Boobus Americanus." If those who are ignorant of history are doomed to repeat it, I think those who aren't readers cannot be very good citizens -- certainly not in a democracy, which can be sustained only by people of reason.
I think of those three readers afloat in the Atlantic, just a few years before their fellow Americans -- those who managed to get to the polls at all! -- voted into office a man who can scarcely read his own teleprompter, and who, with little sense of, and no regard for, history, has so damaged our country that it will be years undoing him if at all. Incredibly, We, the People, returned to the polls and elected him again!
Wasn't anyone reading?
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