http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2012/02/28/DD0K1ND2J5.DTL
He expressed so many of my sentiments towards "book books" that I decided to write him a letter. I'd like to include it here, too.
Dear Jon Carroll,
Your column on your cool Kindle and warm book came at a very good time: just when my floor-to-ceiling bookshelves are being built. For years I’ve had towers of books in my living room because there was no more space for bookshelves, so I tried to give some books away as my son did when he moved from Berkeley to New York City a few years ago. But he said that of all the things he gave away or sold—his car, furniture, stereo, appliances—the only thing he missed were his books. I think we feel the way you do. They feel like old friends.
I grew up with a family that moved from place to place, and even though my parents read a lot, our books always seemed to be in boxes. I felt that once I had a place with books on shelves, I’d really be home. I do have books on shelves as well as perching in towers, so I feel I’m home now.
It’s true that, like you, I don’t go back to those books for quotes. I can find quotes more quickly by Googling. But I do go back to them. I shared a book about Tonga with my best friend from Peace Corps days there and asked her to highlight and write in the margin the way I do. Now, two years after her death from pancreatic cancer, I can re-read the passages she marked and the comments she made.
Have you read Anne Fadiman’s collection of essays on books, Ex Libris? She writes about how she and her husband had to decide whose copy of the same book would go on their shelves when they decided to let their books “mingle” instead of keeping them on separate shelves. She, too, comments on books as old friends but puts it a bit differently, that she and her husband invest in their books the kind of emotion most people reserve for their old love letters. (I still have all my old love letters too!) She also writes about her carnal relationship with her books. She says that in her family, they didn’t treat books like items too precious to touch but rather as something with which to have a complete relationship. She wouldn’t frown on your folding down the corner of books. She’d urge you to go further!
Now I have an iPod, and I listen to some really good actors reading books I buy from Audible.com. But even though I know I’m contributing to the destruction of forests, I wind up buying many of these books I’ve heard on Audible because I want to underline favorite passages and SEE what I’ve heard…on paper, with pages I can turn. Back in 2008 my son Jonathan and I formed the Jo-Mama Book Club, which meets online once-a-month for discussions that go on for about 15 pages of Chat. He now has a Kindle, but he can tell me the page numbers of the passages I’d like to mark as we discuss each book.
My son won’t need floor-to-ceiling shelves for his Kindle. But to make room for my shelves I have already given away my old Oak desk and taken down my tapa cloth (which I can now have handy for welcoming friends at the airport—the Polynesian red carpet).
When my mother died, I walked through the rooms with all her books. (She too finally got her books out of boxes.) In what is now the computer room but was earlier the sewing room after being my little sister’s bedroom, I looked at the shelves with books and framed photos on all walls. I looked in her bedroom with her piles of books on her nightstand and on every other surface except her bed. It made me feel warm and connected. It made her feel warm—still there!
Now it occurs to me that I have the book Shooting the Boh by Tracy Johnston, your very own wife, but to my astonishment, the yellow highlight I used when I was reading it back in 2002 (I put the date—like a diary entry) has faded. Still, the print lives on in this volume soon to be put on my floor-to-ceiling bookshelves!
Tina Martin
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