Giving Books
April 18, 2010

Eight brown grocery sacks filled with books plus another half-dozen armloads are on the floor of my den. Until until yesterday afternoon they graced the bookcases in Dad’s bedroom. Now they are mine.

I visited my parents yesterday. They live about an hour and a half south of me. They are in their mid-eighties, and increasingly frail. I think about them a lot, but with work, BiblioBuffet, and other responsibilities I don’t get to see them as often as I would like. And since they no longer drive, they can’t come up to see me. Time spent with them has become more precious. Yesterday was one of those.

I arrived in mid-morning. Dad looked great for having had two surgeries about a month ago. The last time I saw him was in the hospital and like everyone there, he appeared weak and tired. This time was very different. His wounds have healed. I was cheered to see him looking far better than he has for nearly two years.

Toward the end of the visit, Dad asked me if I wanted to go through his library and take whatever books I wanted. He asked me this once before, about six months ago. At the time I took only Two Years Before the Mast. He seemed disappointed, but  the truth is that Dad’s tastes are very different from my own. He likes a lot of legal fiction, military and political thrillers, fiction and nonfiction on war, especially the Civil War and World War II, some westerns, Wambaugh’s nonfiction, and a couple of classical novels. There are a lot of books by the same authors—Clancy, Grisham, etc.—because when he found he liked an author he bought all his books.

And they’re all men. About ten years ago I tried to convince him to read Barbara Tuchman, the two-time Pulitzer Prize-winning author and historian. I even gave him The Guns of August, the book that detailed the military decisions and actions that led up to the first World War (and established her reputation). That book was on his shelf, but he never opened it. I guess he couldn’t bring himself to believe that a woman could write believably about history and war.

When I first heard that I had a flash of anger. But I quickly doused it. He comes from a different generation, an earlier one in which men accomplished and women supported. He’s not in any way opposed to the societal changes that have occurred but he simply has a different mindset that leads him to focus on male authors. The book was unread. It makes me a bit sad that he missed what I know he would have loved, but it is not my right to insist. He read what he knew he enjoyed. 

Two large bookcases framed two walls of the massive bedroom. I began by standing on a chair to get to the books at the very top. Names repeated themselves—Drury, Dershowitz, L’Amor, Siegel, Coonts, Turow, Kanon, O’Brian. But there were also surprises, books I hadn’t known about: Cap’n Fatso (a lighthearted look at military life), The Grasshopper Trap (a humorous look at the “Great Outdoors”), Turning Right: The Making of the Rehnquist Supreme Court, The Boldest Dream: The Story of Twelve Who Climbed Mt. Everest, The Red Badge of Courage, Reflections on Life After Life, a collection of Doonesbury, two of the Lazlo books by Don Novello, Secrets of the Great Pyramid, Telephone: The First Hundred Years (he worked for AT&T for thirty-five years, until the day of the break-up), Raising the Hunley, and A River Running West: The Life of John Wesley Powell.

While I have seen his bookcases, and I have given him books  I had never really looked at them before. As I took each one down, I held it for just a moment, thinking this is what he loved to read, this is part of him. A number of them had inscriptions from me, and those brought tears to my eyes. I was taking them back, removing them from his life, albeit with his permission. But I felt a sense of loss, or perhaps finality? They had always been but were no longer going to be his. They were becoming mine. And that change is the hard part.

Upcoming Book Festivals:
Two festivals—one on the southern half of the west coast, the other in the northern part of the east coast are going to be taking place next weekend, and if you can go to either of them, do so. They both look fabulous.

On Friday, April 23 and Saturday, April 24, Massachusetts will be hosting the Newburyport Literary Festival. This year’s festival will honor the late John P. Marquand (1893-1960), a Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist (for The Late George Apley) and longtime resident of the city whose name graces the new Marquand Award to be awarded this year to Anita Shreve. More than seventy other authors will join Anita and the community for this festival. Events include Friday’s events: Opening Ceremony: The Writer’s Life – Wally Lamb and Andre Dubus III in Conversation and Dinner with the Authors. Saturday has authors reading from and signing their books; talks, presentations, and lectures; workshops for childre and adults; writers’ workshops; and more.

The Los Angeles Times Festival of Books, one of if not the premier book festival in the country, takes place on the gorgeous UCLA campus  in West L.A. on the weekend of April 24-25. Hours on Saturday are from 10:00 am to 6:00pm and on Sunday from 10:00 am to 5:00 pm. However, I can tell you that booklovers begin arriving as early as 8;)) am to begin browsing the campus. With more than 400 authors, 300 vendors, nearly one hundred free indoor panels, seven outdoor stages with continuous presentations, talks, and entertainment, excellent parking and transportation services, six incredible writing seminars, and a Mobile Scavenger Hunt with an iPad as the prize this festival is simply not to be missed if at all possible. My only caveat: bring your own water and food. While you can buy it there, it is expensive. Save your money for books.

The Pub House:
Turtle Books specializes in illustrated children’s books in both English and Spanish editions.  And they are beautifully illustratee. Take Finding Daddy: A Story of the Great Depression whose cover is a haunting image of a a girl and her dog wearing looks of fearful yet hopeful expressions. It expresses perfectly the story of of Bonnie’s agony when her parents are painfully impacted by the Great Depression.  The Crab Man tells the story of Neville who, in trying to earn money to buy his mother a new dress by selling hermit crabs, learns that the crab man to whom he has been selling them is mistreating them. How does he choose between making his family make ends meet or protecting the enviroment? Other books include The Lady in the Box, a story of two children, a homeless lady, and their impact upon one another; in Prarie Dog Pioneers, a girl learns that a dreaded move has possibilities beyond what she thought; and Keeper of the Swamp is a coming-of-age story in which a boy confronts his fears and learns about the secrets of the swamp from his ailing grandfather.

Win This Book!
This week’s giveaway book is 7 Dirty Words: The Life and Crimes of George Carlin, an overview of Carlin’s life, routines, and methods. To enter, all you need to do is send us an e-mail with “Win This Book” in the subject line and the title of the book in the body of the e-mail. We will collect names and draw one on Friday, April 23. Winners are limited to one book a month. Though we would love to have our international readers be among them, due to high postal costs we simply prohibit our mailing books outside the United States.

Imaging Books & Reading:
Imagine stumbling upon a pile of books. You say you  have? Not like this one. Alicia Martin of Cordoba, Spain, likes to create enormous piles of books as art. This one uses 5,000 of them. Despite the images I found online of her work, I was unable to find out anything about her or how she does it. This exhibit was apparently done in May of 2009. Sadly, that is all I know. But isn’t it fantastic?

Of Interest:
Books and Their Owners is an online exhibition at Kings College London uses some of the holdings of the Foyle Special Collections Library to show how “books have been owned and used by their owners over the last five hundred years. What kinds of people bought or were given books? How did they record their ownership? What kinds of notes or annotations did they make? . . . to what purposes did owners put the unused blank endpapers of their books?“ Despite being only seven “pages” long, this is a unique and unusually interesting exhibit.

This Week . . .
Nicki Leone has a blog. She’s actually had one for a while now, but I felt it was past time to bring it to the attention of our readers. Will Read for Food: Notes From a Bookseller-at-Large is the place where Nicki allows herself to write casually, the blue-jeans version of her dressier pieces for BiblioBuffet, and it roams far wider. Here you can share her love of homegrown tomatoes, of her shock upon first tasting them, her garden, the passages in particular books that stand out for her, her own poetry, and more. This is just one of those blogs that offers so much, and I say that as a reader and as an appreciator of fine things.

Until next week, read well, read often and read on!

Lauren