by

Lev Raphael

I've lusted after books as long as I can remember. I've been filled with the desire to browse them, own them, touch them, stack them, admire them, shelve them, alphabetize them, dog-ear them, annotate them, absorb them, discuss them, read aloud from them, trumpet them, relish them, devour them.

Cherry-stained shelves line my small study on every wall, running over and under the windows where possible, and floor to ceiling. They're my background, my setting, my history, my future, my friends, my inspiration. And to quote Auden out of context, they are "my working week and my Sunday rest.”

I was read to a lot as a child but also quickly learned to read by myself and in second grade discovered a fondness for biographies, my favorite being of Mozart (though pronouncing the word “choir” stumped me in class). I also fell in love with Isaac Asimov via I, Robot. Books in several languages filled our house, even though we had very little money since my parents were immigrants. There was a long low brick and board book case in the foyer of our Washington Heights apartment where a Funk and Wagnall's encyclopedia held stolid pride of place amid books like Gone with the Wind and The View from Pompey's Head by Hamilton Basso (what a title—what a name).

Many of those novels had been bought cheaply from our local stationery store which had a lending library and apparently also sold some if its titles. There was also a narrow bookcase for paperbacks in our dining room; Fifties paperbacks with racy covers (even for novels by Aldous Huxley and Zola) lurked in a shelf over my parents' bed in their room; and science fiction, spelling, adventure and anything else we loved crammed a smallish bookcase in the room my brother and I shared.

Some of the books in my room were hardcovers—I especially recall one on ant and bee societies, another on Greek and Roman civilizations—and I found those volumes very suitable for making "castles," setting them up as walls, with smaller books serving as doors, and the figurines of my choice marching along the "ramparts."

Imagine my joy visiting the local library for the first time. I was like Henry Hudson discovering the river that would be named for him, stretching out with vast promise and mystery. The library was in a turn-of-the-century Gothic style structure, a castle to my young eyes, and featured enormous windows, huge globe chandeliers, and a sense of awe and quiet suitable to a church. I was thrilled to learn I could borrow several books a week or have them borrowed for me. Bliss! Thus began my dual track reading: what I brought home from my hunts at the library was almost always more compelling than what I had to read in school. Which meant that my grades could be indifferent at times, because I was.

I read as widely then as I do now, decades later: history, fiction, natural science, whatever piqued and satisfied my curiosity. Always I looked for good storytelling whatever the genre, and finding a story that particularly held me, I wouldn't let it go. I have today two books I read to pieces when I was around eight or nine: Cheaper by the Dozen and The Three Musketeers. Their bindings are shredded, pages are missing, but I've never wanted to get rid of them to abandon mementos of those early years in elementary school when I found and followed my first love.

I read those two books over and over, so often that it annoyed my parents who urged me to read something else—or go outside and play. Play!? What game could equal a riveting story? What none of us could guess was that I was instinctively reading these books as a budding writer, I was studying them, learning them, and teaching myself. When I pick them up now, they're redolent of the initial sense of discovery when I first entered their pages, and of the renewed thrills of starting a beloved story again.

I understand the value and efficiency of the Kindle and other reading “devices,” but even if I do succumb to one of those at some point in the future, they will never really inspire or nurture me the way actual books can. They may be efficient, but they're cold. Perhaps thirty years from now, people will be waxing nostalgic about their first Sony readers, but will it be book lust they're talking about?


Lev Raphael grew up in New York but got over it and has lived half his life in Michigan where he found his partner of twenty-four years, and a certain small fame. The author of nineteen books in many genres, and hundreds of reviews, stories and articles, he’s seen his work discussed in journals, books, conference papers, and assigned in college and university classrooms. Which means he’s become homework. Who knew? He has reviewed for the Washington Post, Boston Review, NPR, the Ft. Worth Star-Telegram, Jerusalem Report, and the Detroit Free Press where he had a mystery column for almost a decade. He also hosted his own public radio book show for a year and a half where he interviewed Salman Rushdie, Erica Jong, Julian Barnes among others. Lev’s books have been translated into close to a dozen languages, some of which he can’t identify, and he’s done hundreds of readings and talks across the U.S. and Canada and in France, England, Scotland, Austria, Germany and Israel. My Germany will be published April 2009 by the University of Wisconsin Press and in September 2009 by Parthas Verlag in Berlin. You can learn more about Lev and his work, and also contact him through his website.