1996 was not a good year for me, and it got worse as the months progressed. By June, I was reduced to lying on my couch and crying. At one point, I managed to go to the used bookstore, returning home with William Styron’s Darkness Visible and Susanna Kaysen’s Girl, Interrupted. “Why didn’t you get The Bell Jar while you were at it?” a friend asked.

July should have been dismal, but I was saved from further despair by a sequence of events. My dear friend Sonia came to visit, en route from Seattle to Zimbabwe, and because I didn’t want Sonia to have to spend her days on the couch with me, I rallied. I knew we would swim in Puffer’s Pond and dig in my garden — these were pleasures we’d enjoyed the previous year. But we needed an outing, and thanks to the mediocre local paper, which I usually ignore, I found our destination. Beneath a photograph of two white-haired women in front of a white building was a blurb about a retired professor, her partner and their store, the Common Reader Bookshop, located in an old schoolhouse beside a cemetery in New Salem, Massachusetts. I was intrigued from the start, but what I found when we got there was more than I ever expected.

Illustration by Mignon Khargie

I live with someone who collects toy cars — 4,255 and counting, all parked in a one-bedroom apartment. I collect one thing: quotes I find in books, articles and letters. When I’ve finished reading something, I search out my marginalia brackets and record those passages in a quote journal. Even though I read scores of books a year, my single journal, begun a decade ago, is just half full.

I’m highly selective about what I keep. As my partner tells me, there are two kinds of toy car collectors: those who must have everything, and those, like himself, who collect only what they like. Although I’ll sometimes photocopy an entire Mary Oliver poem or write out a page from a Truman Capote novel, most of what gets recorded is no longer than a sentence. The quotes are my objects, albeit intangible ones, whose value and purpose lie in their intrinsic abilities to conjure. 

Illustration by Jeff Crosby

It’s Sunday evening in Petaluma, California, the former Egg Capital of the World, the current World’s Wristwrestling Capital and the site of the World’s Ugliest Dog Championship. I’m eating supper in a gas station that’s been converted into a taqueria when in walks a big man wearing a black cap, black jeans and a black Harley-Davidson T-shirt. He is carrying a small child who’s wearing pajamas decorated with pictures of dinosaurs. The jukebox is blasting mariachi music. The man twirls around several times on his boot heels with the happy child then comes to a stop in front of the cash register. I watch this bit of choreography then go back to my chimichanga, and to Norwood, Charles Portis’ first novel.

Illustration by D.G. Strong

For the first time in 20 years, my books stand in crisp rows and the shelves have room to spare. It’s awful.

In theory, a constant goal of the marriage was an orderly library. In reality, the abiding aesthetic was piles and heaps all over our Far West Village loft, the smart chaos typical of two people who are each reading six different books at any given time and persist in buying more. With so many sentences waiting, who had time to separate the plays from the short stories, much less alphabetize? If the collected poems of Yeats didn’t come to hand when needed, we’d buy another copy; a marriage can’t have too much Yeats. And in case of divorce, we dared joke — because we were that sure of each other — a second copy would simplify the divvying up.

Photo courtesy of West Virginia State Archives

Stumbling onto Mary Lee Settle’s work was a definitive moment in my life. I was browsing in the stacks of the Washington, D.C., Public Library in 1995, and I spotted a book titled O Beulah Land. Having grown up singing the hymn, I couldn’t resist a peek at the book. The moment I opened it and began to scan its pages, I knew I had “come home,” as the old hymns say. I had found a writer not only to read, to admire, but also to learn from. I had found my mentor.

Photo by Lori Eanes

Long-married novelists Michael Chabon and Ayelet Waldman are of one mind about the acquiring, handling and lending of their books — key to any successful marriage between booklovers. Michael is the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay and many other books, the most recent of which is The Yiddish Policemen’s Union. Ayelet is the author of the “Mommy-Track Mysteries” series (with such hilarious titles as The Big Nap and Playdate with Death) and the novels Daughter’s Keeper and Love and Other Impossible Pursuits. The dynamic duo spoke to me from — and about — their book-filled home in Berkeley, California.

Jan 26, 2003
Hi everyone. I’ve been lurking for a while, but the subject of pre-publicity came up and I figured it was finally time I got off my duff and joined. I have a novel coming out very soon (1st novel, 2nd book) and am full of all sorts of pre-pub anxiety, not the least of which is that I’m not doing everything I could be. After reading your discussion, I promptly bought M.J. Rose’s Buzz Your Book, which I plan to read ASAP. Any other advice?

Jan 27, 2003
The novel actually spun out of the last story in my story collection, Circling the Drain. I don’t have the brief synopsis thing down yet, and never feel like I’m doing it justice, but here goes: It’s about a 16-year-old girl who is haunted by the ghost of her formerly fat self, commits an act of revenge and runs off with a small circus ...

One 1970s summer Saturday when my brothers and I had been rounded up from in front of the television and grimly conducted to the garage of our childhood home, my mother paused in the midst of what seemed to us a familiar tearful tirade about chronic cleaning issues, ungrateful children and subsequent maternal escape fantasies. ("You never ... you always ... I wish I could just leave!") As I said, she paused to stand disheartened amidst the repository of banal suburban squalor that was our garage, we children guiltily shuffling, fingering the handlebar fringe on our dusty bicycles, glancing at the covers of heaped-up National Geographics and tuning her out. Our father must have been at his office; he was forever at his office. Only our mother’s uncharacteristic pause caught my attention, her genuinely pained sigh — the sound of having your breath knocked out of you — and I saw her staring up at a queue of forgotten books shelved on the wall above the freezer and the cabinet, where we kept rock salt and tire chains. “Oh,” she gasped to herself, her hair sweaty under a red bandana. She was looking at the title on the faded spine of a copy of Anna Karenina.

Illustration by Bob Bechtol

It is a miraculous thing, to search for something for decades, to come to doubt its existence outside your own memory, and then to have it handed to you, solid and whole.

For 30 years I have yearned for a story that was read to me when I was 12 by a woman in a beige bathrobe, the mother of a summer friend of mine — I don’t remember either of their first names anymore. The husband and father, who lived with his family in Charlotte, North Carolina, was a sales trainee of my father’s. My mother and I had driven south from New Jersey to where he was working the Gift Show in the cavernous Merchandise Mart.

The man, named Roberts, was large and bearded, and I had a bit of a crush on him. He looked like Grizzly Adams, and he lumbered after my father, hugging a clipboard of order forms, trying to learn how to be a salesman. He had a girl my age, and after a day or two of playing waitress together — taking orders of coffee and biscuits for the salesmen and the customers — she invited me home for a sleep over. They lived in a small house with a big yard, almost smothered by green foliage. I remember a pleasant dinner, and bathing in the sweet drawl of their Carolina voices. The girl and I played a game with dice on the floor of their parlor, and she showed me her cheerleading outfit, and the paperback yearbook from her junior high school, and we pointed out which boy was cutest on each page.

But my eyes kept drifting to the wall of books that climbed to the ceiling of that room, and after a while I went and stood by them, holding my head sideways to read the titles. Our home did not have even one bookshelf (although we had four televisions) other than the one that was built into the desk in my bedroom. All the books in the house were mine. I had not been fully aware until that moment that adults, other than teachers and librarians, liked to read as well.

Illustration by Katherine Streeter

“The great god Mars tries to blind us when we enter his realm, and when we leave he gives us a generous cup of the waters of Lethe to drink.”
—J. Glenn Gray

Will Durant once calculated that in all of recorded history only twenty-nine years have been free of any war in any country. Human beings are in the habit of war. It is so deeply a part of our collective consciousness — our worldview — that we cannot envision a world without it. We say war is inevitable; we say it arises from an ungovernable, unchangeable part of human nature.

Categorically transforming a worldview, especially one that is held by virtually all the world, takes either a cataclysm or a very long time. We can afford neither, for a cataclysm could spell the end of the world, and, given the possibility that the war we face right now could run quickly out of control, the time we have left in which to avert a cataclysm may be very short.

It is easy, but dangerous, to feel powerless and afraid in times like these, when war comes without serious Congressional debate, amid the erosion of civil rights, in defiance of international law and despite the opposition of millions. The best antidote to powerlessness is action, and often the way to ignite action, odd as it may sound, is first to read about the very thing we fear. Reading can calm and clear the mind.