so many books, so little time

Ted Gioia:

Daunt also refused to dumb-down the store offerings. The key challenge, he claimed was to “create an environment that’s intellectually satisfying—and not in a snobbish way, but in the sense of feeding your mind.”

That’s an extraordinary thing to hear from a corporate CEO. Daunt wanted to run a bookstore that was “intellectually satisfying” and “feeds your mind.” The first time I heard an interview with him, I decided I trusted James Daunt. I wanted him to succeed. But the odds seemed stacked against him.

Then it started to happen—book sales at Barnes & Noble began rising again. Sales in 2021 quickly got back to pre-pandemic levels, and then kept growing. Readers regained trust in the company. The workers at the stores were more motivated and started genuinely acting like booksellers.

I recently visited a Barnes & Noble store, for the first time since the pandemic. I saw a lot of interesting books, and bought a couple. I plan to go back again.

I went to Barnes & Noble today, for the first time in about a year. Mainly, I wanted the irreplaceable experience of browsing among physical copies of books again. Library sales mostly went dormant after the pandemic, and by the time they started reappearing, work had changed and there wasn’t much time for traveling to them anymore. But in recent weeks, I’d begun to notice that I simply wasn’t encountering much in the way of interesting reviews online. Weeks and months would pass without me feeling excited to read anything new and different. Frankly, I was starting to feel a little brain-dead. But as I’d hoped, I found my visit to be a real tonic. Within a few minutes, I’d found a new book by my old pal Anthony Kronman that I didn’t even know existed, and I quickly added several others. Like sunlight and fresh air, a fellow needs to regularly browse in a bookstore to feel hale and hearty. I think we’ll even make some time to start traveling to library sales again in the new year. Retail stores are fine, but there’s nothing like the discovery of some old, out-of-print book being sold for one or two dollars to inspire you to take a chance on something different.

(The Lady of the House also got me another batch of Everyman Wodehouse for Christmas.)

The first library sale in almost two years! I didn’t find any wish list treasures, but I found plenty of books I’m willing to try for two or three dollars. Some of the old crew was there — Muppet Man, Yuri and Svetlana, and Heroin Chic(k), among others. The last of these had a buddy with her who looks a lot like Wesley Yang. He, Muppet Man and I pondered how much respect anyone would have for the political and literary luminaries of the eighteenth century if they were our contemporaries in the age of social media. We agreed that Ben Franklin would probably be in trouble for sending dick pics to various women, Samuel Johnson would probably be furiously editing Wikipedia, and Boswell would be writing all about it for TMZ. It was good to be back.

Steve Edwards:

I’d started coming to bookstores because I wanted to learn how to write and the only consistent advice I got from established writers was to read everything. It was good advice. It’s still good advice. It’s also impossible. No one reads everything, nor even all the books they’d like to. You make your choices, come what may.

Harvard economist Alexander Gerschenkron once calculated that if one reads two books a week over the course of an adult life (from roughly age 20-70), the final tally will be about 5,000. I’d never suffered from FOMO until I read that. No actuarial life table ever hit me so hard. After my yearly physical this week, there was a brief 48-hour window where my doctor was investigating the possibility of me having an aortic aneurysm, but even the wait for the ultrasound results didn’t bring with it the cold touch of the grave like that unforgiving numeral sitting there, marking the end of all potential. Today I counted the total number of books on my shelves (1500 exactly) and it was like watching sand falling in a hourglass. “Oh, my greed is a flame! Oh, that I might be reborn in a hundred beings!”

Patrick Kurp:

Read the first OED definition of desultory and see how it mutates: “Skipping about, jumping or flitting from one thing to another; irregularly shifting, devious; wavering, unsteady.” A butterfly flits, purposefully. Watch one moving from flower to flower, probing for nectar. Butterflies have evolved a proboscis resembling a coiled, retractable straw. Their flitting is methodical, not superficial.

Flitting among books is what some of us do every day. Sometimes the flitting is pragmatic – consulting a dictionary or other reference work. More often, we have several books going simultaneously, and one book inevitably leads to others.

For a long time, especially when I bought books at retail prices, I prided myself on doggedly finishing every book I started and never owning more than a couple unread books at a time. Parsimony was my guiding principle. I chose carefully which books to buy and ran my eyes over every inch of text between the covers. Once online shopping came around, I was exposed to a lot more suggestive algorithmic whispers from the shadowed alleyways of Amazon, but I stuck to the straight and frugal path, buying used-good as often as possible, usually after letting a book dwell in wish-list purgatory for a while to make sure I really wanted it. Nowadays, money isn’t quite so tight and I haunt library sales dozens of times a year, so I find myself willing to take a chance on a three-dollar-or-less book which might not have interested me in the abstract. Correspondingly, I’ve become a bit more willing to flit away from an uninteresting book rather than plod through like a tortoise, though I still feel slightly guilty about doing so. That Protestant book ethic is difficult to shake off.

Here’s the group of hitchhikers I picked up last weekend. I may have already read the Wodehouse stories, but since I don’t know of any convenient compilations of his plentiful works, I just grab whatever I find. I had the Lasch book on my wish list once, but it never graduated to a purchase. Epicurus, Horace and Erasmus sounds like one of those “ideal dinner party” scenarios. And I’m delighted to see the unjustly-maligned season of winter being honored with a sympathetic biography:

Tom Gerken:

While the two words may have similar meanings, there is one key difference: Bibliomania describes the intention to create a book collection, tsundoku describes the intention to read books and their eventual, accidental collection.

I used to fret over my increasing inability to achieve “bookshelf zero”, but I’m slowly resigning myself to the fact that having forty to fifty books in the “want to read” column is just becoming my new baseline, given my constant exposure to temptation. A friend recently said she prefers having unread books lying around because of the potential they represent. Likewise, I’d rather maintain the feeling of childlike excitement in finding a new book I want to read, even if it keeps me chained to my Sisyphean task.