When asked what books were on his
nightstand, Simon Winchester replied, “It’s rather like a dog’s breakfast.” I first understood this to mean “a complete
mess,” but later wondered if it meant “a little bit of everything.” Turns out my first impression was more
accurate. In my case, though, it is both: a complete mess and a little
bit of everything.
The actual surface of my nightstand
is small and usually too cluttered to hold a single book. Instead, at its feet are three stacks of
books. The stacks are governed by no
organizing principle and are in a constant state of reshuffling. They consist mostly of books I have not yet
read, but which I intend to read. An
exception to this are a group of signed books I brought back from the Banff Book
Festival: Bernadette MacDonald’s Freedom
Climbers and Barry Blanchard’s The
Calling among them. These await my
finding a more hallowed permanent location for them. Also among these is a Paul Zizka photo book
of the Canadian Rockies, Summits and Starlight. It’s a guilty pleasure like a hidden box of
chocolates.
A second category is really just
three books: Thomas Mann’s Lotte in Weimar,
and Goethe’s Elective Infinities, a nice
hardcover edition published in the 1960s and recently found at Powells. I also found a nice hardcover edition of the
Goncourts Journals—Paris in the 1700s—my curiosity having been piqued by Heidi
Julavits repeated mentions of failure to make progress with them (the Goncourt
brothers) in her memoir, The Folded Clock.
A third category is “newly
acquired,” which in addition to the Goethe includes other titles from the
Powells junket: Denis Johnson’s nonfiction, Leap,
and two of Julavits fictions: The Effect
of Living Backwards and The Vanishers. Also: Michel Farber’s’ The Book of Strange New Things.
Almost forgot this category: books
sent to me unbidden in my capacity as book review editor of The American Alpine Journal. These break my heart because most of them
will not be reviewed, nor will I read them.
This accounting mentions fewer than
half, I’m sure. And some of the rest are
unclassifiable. There is the Selected Poems of Pat O’Neill, a massive
book (for poetry) of 379 pages. These
were culled from various flashdrives and garbage bags of notebooks by the composer
and great autodidact, Jerry Brennan. Never
heard of O’Neill? No, you wouldn’t have;
he’s an old high school friend turned northern Michigan curmudgeon (according
to his wife) poet. The work is
extraordinary.
Since all these categories (such as
they are) are shuffled together my copy of the Dalai Lama’s daily meditations
is usually out of sight, and therefore, also out of mind; but when it manages
to percolate to the top of one of the a stacks I try to read from it daily.
If “What’s on your nightstand?” is
really just another way of asking “What are you reading now?” the answer is
Julavits’ The Effect of Living Backwards,
which I came to from reading her nonfiction first, a reversal of my usual
practice. Thus I am reading “backwards.”
In that book she wrote this sentence: “I am a wallet head of exuberance.” I would be happy to read a whole book just to
find such a sentence, but I liked the rest of them too.
This gives me an opportunity to
foresee another obvious question and just come out and tell you that the book I
read last year that I loved most was the aforementioned The Folded Clock. Like much
of what I love most it’s hard to articulate why this is so. When I finished reading it, I immediately
started reading it again from the beginning like a chain smoker lighting his
next cigarette off the butt of his last, saving a match and keeping the chain
linked.
A couple days before Christmas I
was in John King Books in Detroit, one of my favorite places in the world. Oddly, I left without making a purchase,
though I had picked up a copy of Chris Bonington’s The Everest Years at an antique store a day before; it too now
rests in one of the stacks by my bed. Nonetheless, I enjoyed every breath I
took inside of John King Books. In
addition to the breaths, I took photographs, somehow invoking the environmentalist
credo: leave only footprints, take only photographs.
