A Reader on Reading

Because unlike a public library mine requires no common codes that other readers must understand and share, I have organized it simply according to my own requirements and prejudices. A certain zany logic governs its geography. Its major divisions are determined by the language in which the books are written: that is to say, without distinction of genre, all books written originally in Spanish or French, English or Arabic come together on the same shelves. I allow myself, however, many exceptions. Certain subjects — books on the history of the book, biblical studies, versions of the legend of Faust, Renaissance literature and philosophy, gay studies, medieval bestiaries—all have their separate sections. Certain authors are privileged: I have thousands of detective novels but very few spy stories, more Plato than Aristotle, all Zola and hardly any Maupassant, almost all of John Hawkes and Cynthia Ozick but hardly any of the authors on the New York Times best-seller list. I have dozens of very bad books which I don’t throw away in case I ever need an example of a book I think is bad. The only book I ever banished from my library was Bret Easton Ellis’s American Psycho, which I felt infected the shelves with its prurient descriptions of deliberately inflicted pain. I put it in the garbage; I didn’t give it to anyone because I wouldn’t give away a book I wasn’t fond of. Nor do I lend books. If I want someone to read a book, I’ll buy a copy and offer it as a gift. I believe that to lend a book is an incitement to theft.

Like every library, mine will eventually exceed the space allotted to it. Barely seven years after it was set up, it has already spread into the main body of house, which I had hoped to keep free of bookshelves. Travelogues, books on music and film, anthologies of various kinds cover now the walls of several rooms. My detective novels fill one of the guest bedrooms, known now familiarly as the Murder Room. There is a story by Julio Cortázar, “House Taken Over,” in which a brother and sister are forced to move from room to room as something unnamed occupies inch by inch their entire house, eventually forcing them out into the street. I foresee a day in which my books, like that anonymous invader, will complete their gradual conquest. I will then be banished to the garden, but, knowing the way of books, I fear that even that seemingly safe place may not be entirely beyond my library’s hungry ambition.

The End of Reading

“There’s no use trying,” she said: “one can’t believe

impossible things.”

“I daresay you haven’t had much practice,” said the

Queen. “When I was your age, I always did it for half-an-hour

a day. Why, sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible

things before breakfast.”

Through the Looking-Glass, Chapter 5

“WHY SHOULD WE HAVE LIBRARIES filled with books?” asked a smiling young futurologist at a recent library convention. (Futurology, for those who don’t read science-fiction, is a branch of electronics that forecasts future technologies and their prospective uses.) “Why waste valuable space to store endless masses of printed text that can be easily enclosed in a minuscule and resilient chip? Why force readers to travel all the way to a library, wait to find out if the book they want is there, and, if it is, lug it back to keep for a limited time only? Why deny readers access to thousands of titles that their nearest library doesn’t hold? Why yield to the threats of acid corrosion, brittle bindings, fading ink, moths, mice, and worms, theft, fire, and water when all of Alexandria can be had at your fingertips from the comfort of any place you choose? The truth is that reading as we knew it is no longer a universal necessity, and libraries should relinquish those noble but antiquated receptacles of text we call books and adopt once and for all the electronic text, as they once relinquished clay tablets and parchment scrolls in favor of the codex. Accept the inevitable: the age of Gutenberg has come to an end.”