The Last Book Owners

It just started with making occasional notes in books, from a recommendation from Clive James, remember? That author I was supposed to do a podcast series on last year who used to be recently deceased? Then it turned into underlining the passages. The idea was simple and twofold:

1. If I made notes in the book about striking passages, it would instantly trigger the memory of the salient points of the passage without me even having to read it again. 

2. I can't have the next owners of the book thinking I didn't read the book. Can I? 

Pretty soon I realized that if I was gonna stop every time I wanted to observe something to make notes in the margins of books, I would never finish a book. So it turned into marking notable passages with an asterisk, and underlining... every... single... word! 

This pattern has now continued for well over five years. Have I underlined every word in every book I've ever read? Of course not. There's the audiobooks, and of course, there are also the books in which I decided on a caprice not to underline, and/or to stop underlining. And yet that makes me nervous: I can't have the next owners of my books thinking I only read the parts that were underlined either. Can I?

Yet when I'm really reading seriously, intensely, with purpose, perhaps even manically, it becomes a habit. What does it really do for me? I have no idea for sure. But it's like George Costanza said about watching movies at other people's apartments. When I'm passively reading a book, i don't feel like I'm doing anything, when I'm underlining books, I feel like I'm doing something. It's weird to say that you feel like you're an active participant in a book when you write in it, but there's something true about that sentiment. Suddenly the book is not a flat experience, but exists in three dimensions, as though you can feel the difference in dimensional depth between the page and the mark you leave on it with a pencil. 

Obviously, all this is insane, I know it's insane, but insane things are generally believed by insane people more often than sane people, and this unfaithful podcaster is nothing if not thoroughly and totally crazytown bananapants. When my parents saw what I was doing to my books, and occasionally to their books, they went apoplectic. Now, in my defense, these are either books from their shelves they haven't read in fifty years or books from their shelves they haven't read in fifty years! But even so, to them it was vandalism. What kind of nut writes in books?! It's defacing books! It makes the books impossible to read! Nobody can read it again!

Now, in their defense, 'never write in books' was something they taught me from the earliest age. It was one of 'Tucker's Law's along with 'when you're late the lights are against you,' 'no good deed goes unpunished,' and 'never eat yellow snow.' 

But like many notions in families whose orientation is still grounded in assumptions of the 20th century, some notions are endearingly behind the times: because nobody will ever read books again. 

Understand, they'll read books,  at least for a while... probably.... but when they spill coffee on it they won't smudge the ink, they won't smell the glue on the paper, they won't turn the pages, their fingers won't get papercuts or tiny unexpected callouses. Books will just be another screen, and perhaps before long, the written alphabets themselves will be as much a vestigial tail of a bygone era's values and necessities as Rudyard Kipling. Perhaps even emojis, stupid as they are currently, are the alphabet of the future, every emoji its own word and concept with exact specificity no word can attain, each written, or code-programmed, word carrying the dynamism of motion pictures - every word its own movie. 

I live in Baltimore, and our most famous living artist, John Waters, has a famous quote, 'if you go home with someone and they have no books, don't fuck them.' Well, I somehow have a significant other again, and I can't help but suspect that she likes my bookshelves more than she likes me, the thousand volumes sitting on them being an intellectual status symbol the way a cool car is for the less interesting set. We're both nearing forty, and we're probably the last generation who will remember a world where books, rather than e-books, were the dominant mode of intellectual consumption - at least the last generation of Americans. Were we twenty years younger, I wonder if a lot of books would have any more impact on her than a classic convertible. The whole bookish life, the whole life of the mind as it was understood until very recently, now seems an anachronism from 1800. The idea that someone would base a life on it seems ridiculous, the idea that someone would base a life on it he wasn't paid for even moreso, the idea that someone would base a free podcast on it, the ultimate early-21st century mode of entertainment, most ridiculous of all. Who is this podcast for? It's not for the present: nobody's listening. It's not for me: I'd rather write a novel. And it doesn't seem to be for the future either....