Stuffing Isn’t Just for Turkeys
November 30, 2008

I am reluctantly emerging from my holiday weekend feeling as stuffed as any roasted turkey. The difference is that because I devoured more words than food, though there was plenty of the latter, I am feeling particularly well fed.

I had on my literary plate six books that I planned to dive into emerging only for Thanksgiving dinner and lunch with a friend on Saturday. They were:

California Rising: The Life and Times of Pat Brown by Ethan Rarick
Essays by George Orwell
Narcissus Leaves the Pool by Joseph Epstein
The Road from Damascus by Scott C. Davis
Rounding the Horn: Being the Story of Williwaws and Windjammers, Drake, Darwin, Murdered Missionaries and Naked Natives—A Deck’s Eye View of Cape Horn by Dallas Murphy
War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy

I started a bit early on Wednesday night when I took Joseph Epstein’s Narcissus Leaves the Pool to bed with me. Epstein is an erudite essayist, short story author, novelist, and former editor of American Scholar Magazine. His essays encompass the personal and the societal, the micro and the macro points of view. Humor, philosophy and startling insights abound, sometimes in the same sentence. He is a genuine pleasure to read. In an essay contemplating how he has come to view his body he remarks, “I used to think it an agreeable companion that yielded me great pleasure on many forms. Today I look at it somewhat paranoically chiefly for signs of betrayal, for ways it might let me down.”

This observation carries far more weight than its simple words at first seem to hold. I stopped reading for a few minutes to think about that idea. When do we change from seeking bodily pleasure to watching for physical betrayal? Is it because the body does? Or does the body follow the mind? Do we feel that a “certain age” is a sign of decay however well we take care of ourselves? And is this age different for women than for men? Who determines this “age of decay”? Are there physical reasons that elicit that change? Is it more of a societal attitude toward aging rather than a personal observation about the body? The fact that I am still thinking about all this is proof to me that Epstein can take a complex issue, compress it and yet have it emerge from his pen with all its multiplicity intact for the reader who cares to open up its possibilities.

Immediately upon finishing Narcissus, I turned to The Road from Damascus. How I could not have gulped this down as soon as it arrived from Powell’s earlier this year I cannot say. Its subtitle—An American traveling alone meets smugglers, mystics, revolutionaries, Bedouins, wise men, secret police—and other ordinary Syrians—is as enticing to me as steak to a hungry dog. During Davis’s trip through the coastal region of Syria, he recounts his encounters with the rural version of the mukhabarat or secret police:

I realized that a security state would fail without the cooperation of its citizens, and that I was fast becoming a cog in the machine. Collaboration was hard to avoid. You don’t start out on an even footing against the police because they surprise you, shock you—thugs with guns can do that. And this shock is the tip of the wedge. Your apprehension is a form of cooperation. You are tainted, ashamed that you allowed yourself to be intimidated. Then the police play on your lack of self-esteem. “Wouldn’t it be easier,” they suggest, “to help us a tiny bit more?”

I had been warned about Syria’s secret police before coming to this country. “Keep your mouth shut!” was the advice that Rita, my travel agent, had given me.

“You need to be very restrained,” said Alex Bertulis. “You need to do exactly what they ask . . .. But neither Rita nor Alex mentioned the one thing that could have saved me: luggage. In Syria, tourists carried suitcases. Only renegade psycho Iraqi mass murderers humped enormous expedition packs with strings and straps all over the back and everything piled on top.

I’d brought the backpack because it was the easiest thing to do. It was the luggage I took everywhere I went. Also, it gave me flexibility. It allowed me to skip taxis and hike about looking for a hotel. Or I could hike from one village to another and carry my things with me. Or, if I had to escape across a border, fleeing men with dogs and AK-47s, I could cut away from the highways and head for the hills, sleeping in caves during the day, traveling at night by the light of the moon—my version of Walter Mitty’s “ta-pocketa-pocketa” fantasy, to be sure. But the real reason I brought the backpack and other mountain gear was because mountains were the setting in which I had proven myself as a young man. I hoped, somehow, that my mountain gear would summon forth from my middle-aged soul a solid effort against the rigors and challenges of third-world travel.

What I hadn’t figured, however, was the way that Syrians with a grudge might throw an unsuspecting tourist to the mukhabarat for their own amusement.

All sensible men for decades past have been substantially in agreement with what Mr. Wells says; but the sensible men have no power and, in too many  cases, no disposition to sacrifice themselves. Hitler is a criminal lunatic, and Hitler has an army of millions of men, aeroplanes in thousands, tanks in tens of thousands. For his sake a great nation has been willing to overwork itself for six years and then to fight for two years more, whereas for the commonsense, essentially hedonistic world-view which Mr. Wells puts forward, hardly a human creature is willing to shed a pint of blood.

A periodical gets its weekly wad of books and send off a dozen of them to X, the hack-reviewer, who has  wife and family and has got to earn his guinea, not the mention the half-crown per vol. which he gets by selling his review copies.  There are two reasons why it is totally impossible for X to tell the truth about the books he gets. To begin with, the chances are that eleven out of the twelve books will fail to rouse in him the faintest spark of interest. They are not more than ordinarily bad, they are merely neutral, lifeless and pointless. If he were not paid to do so he would never read a line of any of them, and in nearly every case the only truthful review he could write would be: “This book inspires in me no thoughts whatsoever.” But will anyone pay you to write that kind of thing? Obviously not. As a start, therefore, X is in the false position of having to manufacture, say, three hundred words about a book which means nothing to him whatever. Usually he does it by giving a brief resumé of the plot (incidentally betraying to the author the fact that he hasn’t read the book) and handing out a few compliments which for all their fulsomeness are about as valuable as the smile of a prostitute. 

When I worked in a second-hand bookshop—so easily pictured if you don’t work in one, as a kind of paradise where charming old gentlemen browse eternally among calf-bound folios—the thing that chiefly struck me was the rarity of really bookish people. Our shop had an exceptionally interesting stock, yet I doubt whether ten per cent of our customers knew a good book from a bad one. First editions snobs were much commoner than lovers of literature, but oriental students haggling over cheap textbooks were commoner still, and vague-minded women looking for birthday presents for their nephews were commonest of all.

Many of the people who came to us were of the kind who would be a nuisance anywhere but have special opportunities in a bookshop . . .. In a town like London there are always plenty of not quite certifiable lunatics walking the streets, and they tend to gravitate towards bookshops, because a bookshop is one of the few places where you can hang about for a long time without spending any money. 

I also started War and Peace and while I am enjoying the story I am going to be reading this for a while. My goal is to finish it by the end of December. Need I say we will have to see how that goes? My hopes are high, though, since I am already engrossed in the story.

The last two books—California Rising: The Life and Times of Pat Brown and Rounding the Horn: Being the Story of Williwaws and Windjammers, Drake, Darwin, Murdered Missionaries and Naked Natives—A Deck’s Eye View of Cape Horn—never even got their covers cracked. I am truly sorry for both are high on my List To Get To As Soon As I Can. Meaning they are immediately under War and Peace on my nightstand.

I’d say I did quite well especially considering that my plans altered themselves to include the making of a Thanksgiving dinner on Saturday. Because of pre-planning and preliminary steps I had several items that could be put together quickly. This allowed me to sneak away from the kitchen throughout the preparations to read, but the dinner and clean-up did eliminate several hours of reading time.

Nevertheless I consider it a successful reading weekend. I didn’t get to read everything I wanted, but then I don’t expect myself to eat everything that is on the holiday dinner table either. It’s all there. I can pick and choose. I can have more than one portion or none at all. I can eat what I missed the next day or the next week. It’s there for me to enjoy at my leisure.

And it’s the same with the books. I liked this idea and I believe it provided me with a satisfaction that has been missing in the past. Not that I would have been out shopping instead but never before have I made such an explicit commitment to stay home and read. That made the difference, I think, and so The Great Thanksgiving Weekend Read is now an official tradition at my home.

And because I work for a college that takes the four days between Christmas and New Year’s off I am thinking that I will create a similar tradition at that time too. Maybe the two books that didn’t get read Thanksgiving weekend will start it off. And since I will likely still be working on War and Peace that will be included. Now, what else can I add to the inaugural Great Christmas Week Read. Robert McCrum’s biography of Wodehouse is calling out to me as is . . .   
 
Upcoming Book Festivals:
One book festival is coming up. Next weekend, December 6-7. New York City will be hosting the Small Press Book Fair. This fair is presented by and held at the Center for Independent Publishing in Manhattan. More than 100 independent publishers and some of their authors from around the world will be there to chat with readers, booklovers and writers. There will be an Indie Press Read-a-thon at which short selections from various works will be read in a marathon-style open mic event; a variety of panels, events and talks on contemporary events with emphasis on the publishing industry and literary trends. 

The Pub House:
Not only does Coffee House Press publish interesting books, they are having a 40 percent off sale now through the end of the year. This is a nonprofit literary publisher that took its name from “the long tradition of coffee houses as places for the free exchange of ideas, where each individual had equal time for expression, regardless of station or background.” Not only do they publish interesting books, but they appreciate book arts, making their books physically appealing as well.

Among their books “that present the dreams and ambitions of people who have been underrepresented in published literature, books that shape our national consciousness while strengthening a larger sense of community” are a debut novel of a young man struggling to uncover and understand the history that died with his parents, poems that detail Hurricane Katrina’s development from a tropical depression to a Category 5 storm, and a novel about the art of ballet and its sometimes unexpected impact.

Of Interest:
How about a weekly book giveaway? Beginning this week and going through the last Sunday in January I will be listing a book that I am giving away free to a BiblioBuffet reader. If you are interested in winning a particular book, send me an email with your name and mailing address. If I get more than one person who wants the book I’ll put names into a jar and draw the winner. No one in the same household can win more than two books during the course of this giveaway. I promise not to contact you for any other reason and to delete your address as soon as it is not needed. This week’s book: Tycoon’s War: How Cornelius Vanderbilt Invaded a Country to Overthrow America’s Most Famous Military Adventurer by Stephen Dando-Collins. This is the story of  the original Vanderbilt who, when his financial empire was threatened by William Walker’s plan to conquer Central America where Vanderbilt’s profitable business was based, began his own war that eventually involved seven countries and the loss of thousands of lives.

This Week:
I am fascinated by book covers. I love (or hate or am utterly indifferent to) the myriad combinations of colors, images, typefaces, and layouts that show up on books today. (Pulp novels from the twentieth century up through around the 1960s are another odd pleasure altogether.) A blog devoted to “the appreciation of book cover design” is called, appropriately enough, Covers. The covers are shown in thumbnail sizes that can be enlarged; reader commentary is included on the large image page, and generally it is insightful. But the ability to see various covers side-by-side provides a particularly useful way to see how different designers work. 

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

Lauren