I really should have gone to the Friends of the Library Book Sale, which ended this past weekend. On the other hand, maybe now isn't the best time to buy more books.
We're members, and last bought about 3 weeks ago.
I should take the savings and buy another book, right?
Of course, yes. This is the only conclusion that makes any sense whatsoever. Any sarcasm in this comment is purely self-deprecating.
I believe it was a shopping bag at a large chain bookstore that said, "When I get some money, I buy books. And then if I get more money, I buy food, water and shelter."
I've seen that quote at a bookstore in Chicago, attributed to Erasmus, maybe?
If I could go back in time to my first year of grad school, I'd shake my younger self and say, "Only buy the books you're actually working on; everything else, you can get at the libraries. If you read it twice, then maybe you buy it." Moving books is awful.
Unpacking them, though, is great. There's nothing like going through a box of books half of which you've forgotten you own, and they're already all yours!
There's nothing like going through a box of books half of which you've forgotten you own, and they're already all yours!
I don't see why that would be appealing if you've already read them.
10. I don't see why that would be appealing if you've already read them.
LB is lace curtain Irish. Books are a tasteful display of wealth. Especially if you haven't read them.
10: But books are for having just as much as reading. And I don't mean as a display of wealth.
(He means in the biblical sense.)
(Oh fuck, never mind, that's "know", not "have".)
Who reads a book once? A book you haven't read in five years is an exciting fun thing to have your attention attracted to again.
(And the definition of lace curtain Irish is "people who have fruit in the house even when nobody's sick.")
8: Bookmooch doesn't seem to have been touted on this site. It's a nice way to get rid of old books, get new ones, and feel like they've been appreciated, rather than getting 50 cents for them at a store.
Who reads a book once?
I do. There's too many books I haven't read to waste time on rereading ones I have.
Moving books works best in paper shopping bags. You're always tempted to overfill boxes, at risk of hurting your back.
I spent $1000 shipping books cross country when I moved. I'm selling of the 20% I'll never read at fire-sale prices, and they come to $4000+.
10: I don't see why that would be appealing if you hadn't already read them.
My library was already larger than seemed practical when I started college; in the years since, no amount of poverty has prevented its growth for long. So I can't exactly pose as a voice of moderation on the subject of collecting books, except to say that it's a great deal more fun IME than collecting, say, string.
I'll cop to owning, um, a large-ish number of books I haven't yet read. In my defense, I've often cited the following (paraphrased) exchange between Tom Snyder and Harlan Ellison:
Snyder: I hear you have a over a hundred thousand books in your house--
Ellison: Yes, I do. And I know what you're going to ask! Everybody asks me, "Why do you have all those books you haven't even read?" And I say, "Why the hell would I want a house full of books I've already read?"
Even if we take that as read (sorry): I know re-reading isn't a universal habit, but it's a great love of mine. There are quite a few books I've read more than twice; if it's really good, revisiting a book is no more pointless than revisiting Europe (and noticeably cheaper).
20: I feel the same way about songs.
Ellison has over 100,000 books in his house? How big is his house?
My wife told me the other day that she's decided to be over the expense of me purchasing books all the damn time, but that I have to start getting rid of books when I bring new ones in.
I'm really ot looking foward to the fight we're going to have over this one.
My wife told me the other day that she's decided to be over the expense of me purchasing books all the damn time, but that I have to start getting rid of books when I bring new ones in.
I'm really ot looking foward to the fight we're going to have over this one.
It's entirely possible that I've inflated the number over the decade or so since the interview. It was a really big number, though--and, I assume, included a lot of rack-size paperbacks.
she's decided to be over the expense of me purchasing books all the damn time, but that I have to start getting rid of books when I bring new ones in.
Is this just a sneakier way of stopping you from buying new books, or are you getting to the point where space is an issue?
What's the best way to store books? I have more books than I can fit on book shelves, and the boxes I have them in now are getting crushed under the weight (I think because the books don't exactly fill the box).
26, 27 Time to start digging the secret underground book cave!
Why wouldn't you re-read books? If they're all lyrical and fancy, won't it be fun? If they're all fancy and technical, won't it be neccessary?
Now, one reason that I'm not even trying grad school is my terrible memory, but I don't think that even if I had a fabulous memory I would understand and retain every nuance of, say, Anti-Oedipus the first time through. Maybe this is just another reason I wouldn't cut it, though.
(Of course, having a terrible memory does mean that anything you like one time you have the opportunity to like anew, again and again.)
In fact, why wouldn't you reread books? (Other than possessing an eidetic memory, of course)
Why wouldn't you re-read books?
Because life is short and there are so many books out there. Time spent rereading a book is time that could be spent reading a new book and learning something new.
What's the best way to store books?
Something like this, or perhaps this.
34 gets it right. Maybe Frowner reads more novels than my average of 1 per year.
31, 35: Wow, Trinity has one beautiful library. I've found that wooden wine and asparagus crates work great as bookcases, but both are in increasingly short supply.
I find it very difficult to get rid of books yet I re-read very few. If it's one of the rare favorites I'll actually read again then I'll read it over and over and over again over many years. In theory I cling to books I've read and liked in hopes of foisting them onto someone who's never read them yet but I'm incapable of giving them up.
If both Rah and I disappear from the general radar it would be wise to send someone over with a bulldozer to clear the debris, our house having collapsed under the weight of the books in it.
I re-read. A lot. I'm also one of those unfortunate people who can't memorise a damn thing but can remember exactly where on a page a quote was located, and what it looked like. This was my excuse for buying way too many books and over-relying on my personal library for scholarly sources.
38: No joke. I put all 3000 or so of my books together in my office, and hairline cracks have begun opening in the living-room arches underneath.
what it looked like
Black type on a white background?
I had my wedding reception in the peabody library
34: So, seriously, do you remember most of what you read? I don't remember more than the general argument of an academic publication unless I've read it at least twice. Moreover, if I read something I may well forget most of it after a year or two, unless it's something I talk about all the time. For me, at least, there's no point to reading more and more books and then forgetting them all.
Also, I like re-reading because it allows me to practice, so to speak. I'm kind of a dummy about reading novels; I don't pick up on lit crit kinds of stuff really well the first time through, and sometimes I overlook things entirely. But when I re-read, not only do things jump out at me ("Why, the structure of the novel parallels the anecdote that the narrator told in chapter two!") but I can also think more carefully about how I read. I've been re-reading Franco Moretti's The Way of the World (Which I love! It has solved all my political problems! Huzzah!) and also rereading The Custom of the Country and Dianna Wynne Jones's Archer's Goon and thinking about what Moretti says about the English novel as juridical in form and how that compares to the Frenchy-type novel that Edith Wharton seems to want to produce with The Custom of the Country. I first read the Wharton about five years ago when I had never even heard of Moretti and didn't, honestly, have the novel-reading skills (yes, I am pathetic) to think things through in this way. I just couldn't hold all that in my head and expect to learn from it except by re-reading.
Maybe it's different when you're in grad school and all your reading reinforces itself, but since I have to read when I'm not working my regular job (yes, pity me) or wasting time on Unfogged, guys, I've got to reread, or nothing would get learned.
Ooo. I miss the Seminary Co-op.
Me, too. I was just thinking of it the other day when watching some book event on C-Span that took place at 57th St. Books. I remember first going in there, seeing the big posters for the new edition of A Dance to the Music of Time that had just come out with the Poussin on the covers. I really wish I had bought that then.
Moving books, as I had to do not long ago, does indeed suck. When I moved back from Chicago I pruned my library for this reason, giving away all sorts of things that I realized that I would either never read or, if I wanted to do so, could easily acquire again at a used bookstore for less than $5. That said, I could never stop buying books that were important to me in terms of scholarship (even if not directly in fields I have any professional expertise--I'm a sucker for books on early Netherlandish painting, for example), no matter how heavy it all gets. I am very glad, however, to have an excellent library just a couple of stories above me at work to help fill in the gaps. Unlimited borrowing privileges with no due date, whoo-hoo!
44 gets it exactly right, and does so in a lovely voice.
So, seriously, do you remember most of what you read? I don't remember more than the general argument of an academic publication unless I've read it at least twice.
I have a pretty good memory, so yes, I do tend to remember at least the main outlines and many salient details of the books I read. Your second sentence, though, makes me think that we may just have radically different approaches to reading in general. I would say that for most books I read the general argument is plenty for me to remember in the long run, and while I do tend to remember a bit more, at least for a while, I don't really see any need to make a concerted effort to deepen my understanding of one book rather than moving on to another one.
That may really be the key difference here. You seem to read for depth; you read books in a few fields where you have a very strong interest and try to extract as much meaning as possible from each of them (I apologize if this is a mischaracterization, but it's the impression I get from your comments in this thread). I, on the other hand, read for breadth. When I buy a book, it's usually because it's on a topic that sounds interesting but about which I know very little. Then I read the book, and when I'm done with it I remember the main gist and some of the more interesting details, and that's enough for me to feel like I now know something about that subject and can move on to another.
47: Sounds correct to me, although we do need to factor in my genuinely appalling memory.
I have a good memory and I re-read stuff. So there.
Books. Check 'em out. Books. Check 'em out.
Read about stars and cars, electric guitars, cops that work hard, patrolling the boulevard. The heavy weight champ in his craziest bout.
Books. Check 'em out. Books. Check 'em out.
This has been your Unfogged public announcement thread. Now everyone go donate to PBS.
(I re-read too, but only with novels and short stories; non-fiction, I'll go back to, but only for tidbits and references.)
It just occurred to me that it was probably not an accident that there was a scene in Memento where the guy who loses his memory asks his wife why she keeps reading a novel she's already read. I should watch that movie again.
I re-read too, but only with novels and short stories; non-fiction, I'll go back to, but only for tidbits and references.
This is another factor that's probably important. I basically don't read fiction at all, but I can see how something like that where the experience of reading in and of itself is intended to be pleasurable would be more amenable to rereading. When I read it's usually more to acquire knowledge than to take any particular aesthetic pleasure from the books themselves. Not that there's no aesthetic pleasure involved, but it's secondary.
Teo's 47 sounds about right for me. I'm not really understanding the good memory/bad memory thing. It's a question of how much information you take in; new thoughts crowd out old, no matter the state of your memory.
This in what Teo says strikes a discord, though:
You [Frowner] seem to read for depth
I certainly read for depth, or perhaps, read deeply, but that doesn't ...
Ah. Nevermind. Sometimes I read in narrow fields for depth, as it's being defined here; other times I read for breadth in a field I know little or nothing about.
I've devoted a shelf in my study (which is also the guest room) to "good books I've read but probably won't re-read, which are free to guests." An older friend of mine had something like that, and I thought it was a lovely idea.
which are free to guests
This is a great point. I'll happily part with a great book, often but not always in exchange for something else. I've been on the receiving end of such exchanges, too.
The best was receiving James/Jennifer Finney Boylan's The Planets with the stipulation that I had to pass it along to an interested party. I know the next two people who read it, and then, and then...! Hooray, books!
53: I guess I'd say that I "read for depth" but I'm not so sure that I "read deeply"...sort of like "thick description" in anthropology isn't neccessarily deeper than thin description. I just get hung up on remembering the details. Like, it bugs me if I can say "Moretti argues thus-and-such-a-thing" but I can't recap most the of details of his examples. I feel like I haven't really internalized the idea if I only know the shape of the argument and not the content of the examples.
Right now, in fact, my project is to read those novels that I have not read that Moretti references in The Way of the World. I'm doing something similar with Archaeology of the Future, but I've read much of what Jamison is writing about already. I'm also working up to rereading some Freud in relation to Moretti, plus a couple of the critics he talks about.
Maybe that's a question to ask: how do you decide what to read next? With me, it's almost always reading outward from something. Like, I read Samuel Delany's Motion of Light in Water where he talks about Italian Journey and went and started on that; and then I started reading the Moretti because Moretti talks about Goethe. Or I was reading Gore Vidal, who really liked the exceedingly trashy tropes-of-slash-fiction The Persian Boy, which is "about" Alexander the Great, so then I started reading The Anabasis (which I didn't finish), so then I started reading that Phillipe Aries-edited book about daily life in ancient Rome and the Byzantine Empire, so then I started reading the next book in the series which is about the late Middle Ages and now I'm re-reading a science fiction story by L Timmel duChamp about Abelard and Heloise.
Unpacking them, though, is great.
"The books are not yet on the shelves, not yet touched by the mild boredom of order." I've read that essay half a dozen times, probably. I've always been a re-reader. Every year, from the time I was 12 or so until I was 15 or 16, I read Something Wicked at Halloween, The Hobbit at Christmas, and The Razor's Edge on summer vacation.
Today, I probably read 2 or 3 new books a month, but I still re-read a lot. I just started re-reading an art book which I've read twice before and I think I am only now grasping the strengths and weaknesses in the author's arguments. But I don't claim to actually do anything with what I read. If you read non-fiction strictly for content, I see how re-reading might be less productive.
Populuxe
Did you enjoy THe Razor's Edge? I loved it, but critics never really grabbed it.
Man, what if we started, like, this unfogged reading group, wherein we read something, you know, in intervals, and then, like, talked about, just like we talk about stuff here, but a little bit more high-brow. That'd be so great...
Cool! Let's pick the most difficult or obscure book available for less than twenty five dollars.
I have way too many books. I re-read them often:
pale fire
lolita
All the King's Men
Miss Lonelyhearts
As I lay Dying
The Great Santini
The Lords of Discipline
Borges
Fuentes
Razor Edge
Flannery O'Connor
Walker Percy
Judah Benjamen
I keep rereading them.
It is an addiction.
Looks like will's not invited to the book club me and Gonerill are starting…
I vote the first book should be Israel on the Appomatox or Richmond Burning.
I haven't read The Razor's Edge in 20 years or so, but it's still one of my favorite books. I don't remember how I first discovered it. I know I read it before the Bill Murray movie came out. If I remember right, Of Human Bondage was more popular than RE, but that book wasn't unpopular. I mean it was filmed twice. I never could decide if I wanted to be Larry or Eliot. I think I've ended up being something of both.
63: Hey, will, I was just reading this thing over at Standpipe's blog. Shit cracked. me. up.
I should say, Standpipe's blog linked to that thing. That's what I meant.
Maybe that's a question to ask: how do you decide what to read next?
It depends, or has, depended, entirely on whether I'm in a program. As a graduate student, then after finishing classwork, A.B.D., all my reading was targeted. What you read next is driven by research, bibliographies. That's in-depth reading.
Now, as a bookseller surrounded by bazillions of books threatening to topple on my head on a daily basis, I read in a more zig-zagged way, as you (Frowner) describe. Chiefly non-fiction. Yes, there is direction, but I don't necessarily finish a given title before moving on. I actually consider that a good thing, the not-finishing.
Nonetheless, getting out of the narrow focus of the graduate program has been absolutely great.
Crap. I give up.
You don't actually read my blog, do you, Stanley.
stanley:
Wow. A little too serious for me.
When I get to pick the reading selection, I am assigning www.drunkcyclist.com
69: I didn't think we'd have to talk about this here. I cry.
Barthes says in S/Z that there is no first reading, which is more or less what Frowner said in 56 but Frencher and more likely to be run over by a laundry truck.
Is this just a sneakier way of stopping you from buying new books, or are you getting to the point where space is an issue?
The missus is just less comfortable with things than I. If she had her way, we would have under 50 books in the house, and we would get all of our reading material from the library.
I, on the other hand, still think about the set of 20 rows of shelves at my college library set on a track and that one moved back and forth using a wheel-and-gear system in order to maximize book storage in a given volume of space with a certain amount of nigh-erotic longing.
Time to start digging the secret underground book cave!
So you've heard about my basement, eh?
Further to my 68:
It occurs to me that I didn't respond to what I take to be Frowner's subtextual query, which was a sort of dissatisfaction with the manner of her reading. I wanted to say that there are drawbacks to both manners of reading.
When you're deeply involved in narrowly circumscribed subject matter, your handle on it benefits a great deal from writing and talking about it extensively. Then you can, say, work detailed examples; this has nothing to do with having a good memory.
When you don't write and talk with others about what you're reading, but dart about on your own, well, you dart about. Which means you might become somewhat more interesting.
-- A consummation devoutly to be wished.
74, 75: You're saying Frowner's not interesting?
Meanies.
Well, at least you didn't call Frowner a big whore. That's good.
Apparently there's a universe, tangent to our own, where people take M/lls to heart.
The people over here and the people over there could do this, except universer.
And therefore awesomer.
Me, window kiss someone? What do you take me for, SB, some kind of whore?
Speaking of Maugham, yeah, Razor's Edge was pretty good, but it was nothing compared to his wonderful essay on Chinese methods of using hot peppers to make wound dressings palatable, even delicious.
You're not paying attention! I am proposing UNIVERSE KISSING, M/lls, you whore.
I like Bridgeplate.
Plus apparently nobody here knows how to handle their books. The boxes need to be full before you stack them on top of one another, else they'll collapse! No, you cannot pack books to carry/travel in paper bags.
Good grief.
And the Trinity Library is fucking gorgeous.
Thanks, parsimon.
Also.
I came upon a sheet of glass in the darkness and thought I could look through it into another universe, but as I stood there a light came on behind me and all I could see was my reflection.
85: I hadn't seen that one, Standpipe. Genius.
Why must you refuse to take my bait? It's Of Hunan Bandage, you philistines.
87: Thanks. Sadly, I've just run out of covert multimedia propositions.
88: We're absorbed by the glass and its possibilities.
Do you know how long it took me to think of "covert"?
"Subliminal"? No.
"Subtextual"? No.
"Encoded"? NO. Like a spy!
"Out-of-band"? Christ.
SB's brain is running like molasses.
I have just deleted what for me would be a lengthy, sober and delightful recounting of partings through the glass. You can thank me later.
Pretty much all of Trinity is beautiful.
I lurk so often; how tragic to miss the Coop thread. Nothing ever lives up to those stores, although the Ithaca sale comes close.
SB's brain is running like molasses.
Through my nose, onto the grindstone. It's an awful mess.
The boxes need to be full before you stack them on top of one another, else they'll collapse!
Also, only pack them laying flat on their fronts/backs, or you'll jack up their spines.
No, you cannot pack books to carry/travel in paper bags.
Can too! A paper grocery bag with handles does a nice job carrying just enough books to nothrow out your back when you have one full bag in each hand.
I wouldn't use a bag for a cross-continental move, but for a local one? Sure.
I have moved my ton of books several times, and paper bags was the easiest.
Not to be nosy or anything, but you mentioned selling a whole bunch of books at firesale prices. You wouldn't have a list of what you're selling you could put up on Idiocentrism or something, would you? I have a hard time contemplating books changing hands without at least knowing what they are, so I could intervene if it looks some might be at risk of going to homes in which they'd be underappreciated.
paper bags was the easiest.
I prefer folding them page by page into paper airplanes so that they can make the journey under their own power.
under their own power
Does locomotion come from the author's original intended meaning, or do you have to attach little motors to each page?
At my URL I have a partial listing. Not too many general-interest books; a lot of stuff on China and in Chinese, some in French.
Some of my books (the Heritage club books) would be good for someone whose hobby was bookbinding. The covers are beat up, but the books are in good shape and are well-made, beautiful books.
Another listing here: ABE page with several catalogs
You're selling a copy of the Da Vinci Code? I have lost all respect.
But thanks for the link -- I'll be looking through them for anything interesting.
A few of the books showed up in the house.
No, no, I meant that I lost all respect for someone who would sell, rather than treasuring, a copy of the Da Vinci Code.
i'll give it to ya free, LB. I believe I've priced it a cool $3., but whatever.
