Battle of the Books

by

Lev Raphael

When Holly Golightly has a case of “the mean reds,” she goes window shopping at Tiffany’s. Me, I just walk into my study and settle down, and it’s as if I've drawn a warm quilt around myself on an icy day. The books surround me, thousands of them, dating decades back: fiction from a dozen different countries (though most of it is English or American), biography, history, Judaica, crime fiction, drama and poetry, French history and culture, Holocaust Studies, biography, memoirs and letters, Henry James and Edith Wharton, African-American studies, gay studies, women’s studies and several jumbled shelves that resist order because their contents are so miscellaneous.

These books are my diary, my personal history as much as the rings of a tree mark its growth. They chart enthusiasm, passions, dead ends, discoveries. When I interviewed Julian Barnes and asked who his writer colleagues were, he said the authors of all the books he loved, living or dead, where his friends. I realized that I feel the same way.

The presence of these books calms me down, though the way I move from book to book might seem anything but calm. Currently, I have bookmarks in a volume of letters by Graham Greene; a classic history of WW II in Europe; a biography of Christopher Plummer; The Year of Living Dangerously (which I read when the movie came out years go); The Genius in the Design (a study of the rivalry between artists Bernini and Boromini); and John Marchmont's Legacy, a Victorian “sensation novel” by Mary Elizabeth Braddon.

But as I move from one book to another and back, I don't worry about being ADD. I know the real problem, if it is a problem, is book lust.

I want to read all these books, to relish the stories they tell, to absorb the information they offer, to mark and hopefully remember beautiful or striking observations. But I also want to have read them. I want to be done. Because the next week will bring more reviews of books I must have and the newer the book, the more exciting the read. It's as if they're all wonderful gleaming toys in Fifth Avenue’s F.A. O. Schwarz and I’m a little kid again.

My hunger for experience via books means that now as always, I read broadly, across genres. One of the most inspirational things a creative writing teacher ever said to me in college was “Read everything!”—a stirring version of Samuel Johnson’s observation that “You can never be wise unless you love reading.” In those days, before being published, I could only afford paperbacks and relied heavily on the Penguin Library. Now I prefer hard covers for their weight and bulk which seems to match their significance in my life.

The older I get, and the more I sense how fleeting life is, the more books I want to get through. Ironically, since I gradually phased out of print reviewing five years ago when I quit writing for the Detroit Free Press and then other outlets, I find myself lingering over books much more than ever before, truly savoring them if they’re good. So within me there are now two warring instincts: book lust and book enjoyment.

I waver between relishing the time to spend a week or more on a book if I want to, and devouring it if the author has hit me where I live, which happened most recently with Amitav Ghosh’s The Sea of Poppies set in 1830s India. As a reader, I was swept away by his recreation of a lost time and idiom; as an author I was awed by his ability to weave together the lives of such disparate characters–from Indian prince to lowly carter–in a literally breathtaking way.

D.H. Lawrence opined that “man's great journey in life is into woman.” I’d amend that for writers: our great journey in life is into book after book after book. This is how we learn, this is how we live as much as whatever we actually do and experience outside the printed page.


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.