I am officially playing hooky from book club. It's been two weeks now and although I have technically started Infinite Jest and it does indeed appear to be worth reading, I can't seem to commit to carting its bulk around the apartment for the two or three weeks it will realistically require. Today I turned to the ultimate antidote: a book about reading (Anne Fadiman, Alberto Manguel-style). I've been trying to decide how similar this activity is to, say, a football player watching old game tapes in the off-season, and have decided the player would have to be at least up off the couch occasionally, perhaps rehearsing a throw or two. But there might be beer and chips on hand as well. I like book books for compiling new lists of things to read, for getting my bearings in a particular region's literary output, or as a prompt to finally open a classic I've been sort of vaguely pretending to have a cursory knowledge of. There can, though, I think, be too much of this good thing, and generally by the time I've finished a book book I'm ready to get back into the deep end, take the training wheels off, what have you. I find the worst examples from this sub-genre can occasionally wind up feeling a bit precious, proclaiming a love for books over and over again without really sparking an interest on the part of the reader-once-removed for any of the books apparently loved.
Lawrence Clark Powell's Islands of Books is not one these worst, however. The fifteen essays in it cover Powell's extensive research on the work of D. H. Lawrence, as well as Melville, Whitman, Durrell, and his immersion in the California and Southwest literary landscape. Although I haven't read all of the books he discusses, what I really appreciate is the emphasis he puts on the places he was when he first read each book, and his descriptions of how each location continues to inform his later returns to the work. This is something I've always found fascinating, because your location can have very little to do with the reading material, but it gets so firmly lodged in memories of it that it becomes a second layer of setting. I remember in my last year of university taking a Shakespeare class that turned out to have a fairly ambitious syllabus. One of my housemates wasn't home all that often and I did a lot of the reading in the hammock he had strung up in his room. I'm actually a little surprised still that the hammock was able to support both me and that giant forest-green Norton anthology. Some of those plays--Julius Caesar, Coriolanus--for me will always be set as much in the courtyards and squares Shakespeare supplied as in the diamond pattern of the string at the foot end of Jason's hammock. Powell gets that and he, I think quite rightly, makes something more of it than a passing anecdote.
Islands of Books was one of my Benson, AZ, finds from last fall (I think you can actually see in the photo I've posted where my sweaty paw discoloured a bit of the uncoated cover stock. It was a hot one.) The book is a beauty design-wise. It's a 1991 reprint of the 1951 original, and was published by Dawson's Book Shop in Los Angeles. It was typeset by Ward Ritchie, who I've previously had trouble finding much information about online, but lo, my latest search has just turned up another book published by Dawson's, all about Ritchie's design and print work, available to order from the Oak Knoll website. I'll have to go tell my credit card the bad news. Really, how can I be expected to keep up with a prescribed reading list when stumbling down rabbit holes is so much more exciting?
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