We Need Books. Lots of Books.

In praise of piles of books

On recent business video conferences from the Middlebrow bedroom/office, friendly participants have asked, “have you read all of those books behind you?” It’s a common question that civilians ask of book hoarders and libro lovers. The honest answer is always, of course, no. A personal library is less a testament to accomplishment than a statement of ambition. All books are picked up, purchased or received with good intentions but they don’t all get read, or read right away.

The Middlebrow tends to bounce around through miniphases throughout the year. “Let’s read all of the books by George Saunders,” was one. “Let’s read a bunch of plays,” was another. Right now, it’s “old Paul Auster books that a neighbor left in the laundry room,” which has caused a mini-fascination with this painting, which is at the Brooklyn Museum and needs to be visited.

Moonlight by Ralph Albert Blakelock

Somehow, though multiple copies of War and Peace have followed me around, an adequate obsession has yet to take hold. Also, I’m not sure if there will be an Auster break after Moon Palace as there is also an obsession with the late Terry Pratchett brewing. Then there’s a hankering to return to the prose of Samuel Beckett, specifically a book called More Pricks Than Kicks.

The home book collection is as much about re-reading as it is reading and there is always the anxiety that in a lifetime, some books will be read over and over while some are not read at all.

A constant book question of 2022, though, is whether all these books are necessary, as they can be mostly stored in the cloud and accessed from any device. One problem is economic. While all the public domain books can be accessed on line for free, everything that’s still under copyright, including contemporary English translations of older works, would have to be repurchased at considerable expense. This is a bit of the scam of the modern economy where services like Spotify charge you a monthly fee to listen to music that you already own on compact disc or as digital downloads.

But even if there were no transaction costs, the Middlebrow wouldn’t trade a physical library for a digital one. The innovation of the paper book is that it never disturbs you while you are reading the way a phone, tablet or PC would. If I try to read a novel on my MacBook, invariably some website will interrupt to tell me that I should be reading somebody’s hot take about Olivia Wilde and if I ignore that, some alert will strongly imply that I have been insulted on Twitter and must defend my honor. Or somebody will send me a text message. Perhaps this message will be from a retailer who believes I should be buying clothes online, rather than reading.

An advantage to the physical library is it can be browsed, as if it’s a store. Books acquired but then forgotten can thus become an obsession of the moment. This rarely happens with digital archives. The information has to be seen and touched.

Another advantage to books is that they are durable. They can survive environmental extremes, being dropped or roughly handled in ways other media cannot. A book from a hundred years ago will work for you in ways a phone from five years ago cannot. Beyond that, the contents of books, while not always or even mostly timeless, do seem to endure in ways that films and music and whatever we do on social media imply cannot. If I go through a Vonnegut phase, as I did once this year and once last year, the experience feels contemporary because Vonnegut’s stories and insights apply as much today as they did when they were written. They were not part of a “vibe” that passes into dim memory (as the concept of a “vibe” inevitably will).

A digital library is also not a conversation piece. Nobody ever asks you if you’ve read everything in your Kindle. How would they even know what’s there?

In short, the answer is I have not read all the books and will never read all the books. New ones will join the collection, some pushing others back on the list and others finding themselves pushed back by incumbents. I’d say the shelves are ever gentrifying, but it’s not so simple as they all have to learn to live with each other.

Sheesh, I haven’t even read all the comic books!