For those who love reading books, it’s a sublime moment: when the reader goes from using the front flap of a hardcover’s dust jacket as a bookmark to using its back flap.
It’s a bittersweet ritual that fills you with feelings of both accomplishment and regret. You’ve traveled so far on your literary journey, been transported, but you’re reminded that this book, like all things, is finite.
It’s time to stop reading, turn out the light and go to sleep, but before you do, you perform a quick assessment: Where am I?
You’re exactly at the halfway point. You ease the glossy flap from the back of the book and slip it between two pages to mark your place. When you next pick up the book you will be reminded you’re on the downward slope, reminded that the book is mortal, reminded that you are.
Or maybe you just turn down the corner of the page.
I can do that with a paperback, but I just can’t with a hardback. There’s something sacrosanct about that thick, creamy paper. To crease it is to defile it.
And yet that doesn’t stop me from writing in a hardcover book if it’s one I’m reading for work. I’ve tried using Post-it notes, but they soon become a bristly, yellow jumble. Besides, with each stroke of my Rollerball pen, I’m providing source material for future scholars who will scrutinize my books and wonder why I circled what I did.
I go through cycles with my reading. For a while, I was into books about cannibalism among sailors and polar explorers. This is a surprisingly large genre.
Then I was into super-specific nonfiction books on a single narrow subject: “The Pencil: A History of Design and Circumstance.” “Salt: A World History.” “Cod: A Biography of the Fish That Changed the World.” “Mauve: How One Man Invented a Color That Changed the World.”
There are a lot of books about how some arcane thing or unsung person changed the world: “Banana: The Fate of the Fruit That Changed the World.” “Papyrus: The Plant That Changed the World.” “Gal?pagos: The Islands That Changed the World.”
I guess nobody wants to read a book titled “Peat: The Moss That Left the World Pretty Much the Same.”
I used to almost exclusively read nonfiction. That’s odd for a 1980s-era English major, but so much of it is so good these days. Laura Hillenbrand comes out with great stuff such as “Seabiscuit” and “Unbroken.” And there’s Erik Larson’s work, with “The Devil in the White City” and “Dead Wake: The Last Crossing of the Lusitania.” They leave me inspired and envious.
But lately I’ve been incorporating more fiction into my literary diet. Sometimes, I learn more about the world from books that are made up than from books that are meticulously researched. The most recent novel to really move me was “All the Light We Cannot See” by Anthony Doerr, a beautiful and painful story set in France and Germany during World War II.
Biographies can be good, too, although you really have to want to spend time with the person who is the subject of the book. And as important as that is for the reader, imagine what it must be like for the writer.
Last week, I finished “Young Orson: The Years of Luck and Genius on the Path to Citizen Kane” by Patrick McGilligan. How precocious and audacious Orson Welles was! At just 16, he traveled alone to Ireland, which he toured for months in a donkey-pulled cart. Upon arriving in Dublin, he bluffed his way into a role with a theater company. And then at age 25, he co-wrote, directed and starred in the world’s greatest movie.
At 832 pages, it’s a long book, but I enjoyed every page.
For most of my life, I’ve been pretty loyal when it comes to books. If I started a book, I finished it. My lovely wife isn’t that way. She’s demanding. If a book doesn’t appeal to her in the first few chapters, it’s tossed aside or brought back to the library. It never has a chance to undergo that dust flap, bookmark ritual.
I’m beginning to see her point. There are too many books out there that I want to read, if I had but world enough and time.