A Walker in the Suburbs

Before there was Amazon one-click ordering, there was the serendipitous joy of finding a book that I’ve been wanting to read for a long time on a dark dusty shelf in the nether regions of the library.

Though it could be any book, this time it’s Wallace Stegner’s When the Bluebird Sings to the Lemonade Springs. I can already tell that it will be a keeper, that I’ll probably end up buying a copy of my own through — yes — Amazon one-click ordering.

But back to serendipity, to the way it feels to look up a book in the library catalog (and in the old days those wooden boxes ), scribble the number on a card and then go in search of it. This might take a while, especially if it’s a Dewey Decimal system; those numbers always give me headaches. But soon I have zeroed in on the row, then the shelf and then (miracle of miracles) the book is actually there, where it is supposed to be.

What’s captivating about the library find is the book’s tangibility, its placedness, it’s being there. But what fuels the joy of discovering it? It’s the plain simple (but intangible) fact that good books, in some way, become a part of us. More us than our bones and breath.

When I read this morning that today is the birthday of Gabriel Garcia Marquez, born in 1927 and still living, I thought of his best book. Not 100 Years of Solitude, which took me almost 100 years to read (though I did eventually finish it). But Love in the Time of Cholera.

It has been several years since I read this novel, but I still remember the transcendent last chapter, when the beautiful but aged Fermina and Florentino, the man who has waited 50 years to be with her, take a steamboat voyage down a river bloated with corpses.

Love triumphs over death is the theme, but I can remember little else of that last chapter, only that I held my breath from the beauty of the language and the depth of the thoughts. This morning I’ve looked for quotations that might give a hint of this book’s grandeur and I found this one by Florentino: “Love becomes nobler and greater in calamity.”

But I’ll leave the last words to Thomas Pynchon and a review of the book he wrote for the New York Times in April, 1988:

There is nothing I have read quite like this astonishing final chapter, symphonic, sure in its dynamics and tempo, moving like a riverboat too, its author and pilot, with a lifetime’s experience steering us unerringly among hazards of skepticism and mercy, on this river we all know, without whose navigation there is no love and against whose flow the effort to return is never worth a less honorable name than remembrance — at the very best it results in works that can even return our worn souls to us, among which most certainly belongs Love in the Time of Cholera, this shining and heartbreaking novel.

On the same weekend that I finally dipped my toes into the Kindle, I also bought two new bookcases. Tall, skinny ones that slip nicely into an oddly shaped alcove that we’ve been trying to make the best of — design-wise — since we bought the house.

So while I’m willing to try the electronic book, I’m making room for more of the real articles. Today I’ll read a library book on Metro. I’m racing to finish it so that I can dig into the latest Ann Patchett novel that Suzanne is lending me (and which someone else has lent her).

And so goes the community of book readers — trading, discussing, and yes, even hording. I imagine that soon my Kindle will be as full to bursting as our book shelves.

Meanwhile, we’ve created a little book nook in our bedroom: a rocking chair, a pouf (soft ottoman), a reading light and lots and lots of the the real things, just waiting to be plucked from the shelves onto our laps.

Not exactly this but something like it…

Today I went over to the dark side — the electronic e-reader, the Kindle. A generous Christmas gift from my brother Phillip, it has been sitting unopened on my bookshelf (interesting place for it to wind up), taunting me with possibility and with dread.

What of all the posts I’ve written about “real books”? What of my English major stand in favor of ink on paper and the codex? Are these scruples gone?

Of course not. The e-reader will always be a supplement, one more way to read a book. It will be interesting to see if I can navigate it, of course. Already I’ve had to enlist help from Tom (how to scroll) and Celia (how to return to my home page). They have rallied bravely to the cause of this technophobe. And now I have several free books in my queue (including Aristotle’s Ethics and the entire Bible!) and a couple sample chapters to peruse.

I’ve read four times more books since I got my Kindle, a friend told me a couple days ago. That’s what made me do it. Four times more books! I’m in.

Above: a more old fashioned way of retrieving books.

A winter reading binge this weekend: Two by Conrad Richter, The Trees and The Town. The latter won the Pulitzer Prize in 1951, doubtless in part because of sentences like this:

“She reckoned she knew how one of those old butts [trees] in the deep woods felt when all its fellows were cut down and it was left standing lone and gaunt against the sky, with only whips and brush and those not worth the axe pushing up around it.”

The “she” is Sayward, the woods woman heroine of Richter’s “Awakening Land” trilogy. (I wrote about the middle volume, “The Fields,” a couple weeks ago.) And in this passage she’s at the end of her life, remembering the kind of people she knew in her youth. “In her time in the woods, everybody she knew was egged on to be his own special self. He could live and think like he wanted to and no two humans you met up with were alike.”

If she could feel this way in a 19th-century frontier town along the banks of the Ohio, then no wonder I fret about the unanimity of personality in 2012 suburbia.

A few pages later, Sayward ruminates on the new trees she planted in the side yard of her grand city house. “No, she couldn’t blame these young trees of hers. They did uncommon well since they were planted. Sometimes at night, especially when there was no moon, she thought they changed into wild trees. Then they looked mighty tall. They stood like Indian chiefs, letting the dark come over them, like this was still their land and they were the masters of it, like they hadn’t lost heart. Oh, she had to admire their spunk and feel for them, three young forest trees against a whole city. Sometimes she wishes she could give them back their land, for it was she who had taken it from them.”

Today I’ll look kindly upon saplings and other young living things. I’ll hold out hope for them.