Too many books

For most of my life, the phrase "too many books" was a foreign concept to me. You can never have too many books. Any book worth reading was worth keeping, I thought. And that's what I did.

My personal library began growing when I joined the Doubleday Science Fiction Book Club as a teenager. Almost every month I got one or two cheap hardbacks by people like Isaac Asimov and Clifford D. Simak. In college I took lots of literature classes, each requiring the purchase of several books. In addition, I loved spending any extra money I had at college bookstores.

Near the start of my newspaper career I began reviewing books, which meant publishers sending me books by the armload. In my mid-thirties, my wife and I purchased a spacious new home that seemed to have an endless amount of room for an endless number of books.

But then I got old and the time came for downsizing. I like having lots of books around, but my son does not feel the same way. And then we bought a condo and, eventually, I sold my big house. "Too many books" became a reality, one I am still trying to deal with.

I sold about half my library at auction. Most of the rest are in storage. Yet old habits die hard, if they die at all, and I continue to acquire books. I no longer, however, feel compelled to keep every book I read. Even so, I am practically buried in books.

And then I became condo librarian. Residents regularly donate books, which is good, but since the shelves are already filled, I must take one book off the shelves each time another is donated. Here too there are too many books.

I was fascinated by the very first page of Donna Leon's 2023 mystery So Shall You Reap. Guido Brunetti, Leon's hero, has but four bookshelves in his own home — his wife, a professor, claims the rest — and they are full. It is time for what he terms The Cull.

"The first shelf held books he knew he would read again; the second, at eye level, held books he wanted to read for the first time; the third, books he'd not finished but believed he would; and the bottom shelf held books he had known, sometimes even as he was buying them, that he would never read."

I have many more books than Brunetti has, and my shelves are not nearly as well organized, and yet my approach to culling is essentially the same as his. He begins at the bottom, with those books he knows he will never read. And that is where I must also begin.

Books that flatter us

Always be cautious with books about books! The risk is flattery,

Robin Sloan, introduction to So Many Books by Gabriel Zaid

Robin Sloan

Books about books are always popular with those who love books. Why? Because they flatter us, Robin Sloan says. They compel us to buy them. We like to read about ourselves, and books about books are, in some way, about us.

I have never in my long life seen so many novels with book-related themes. There are novels about librarians who become heroic spies during World War II. There are novels about romances set in bookstores and libraries. There are novels about writers, about book clubs and about lost books.

Among the unread novels on my own shelves are The Fiction Writer by Jillian Cantor, The Librianist by Patrick deWitt and The Dictionary of Lost Words by Pip Williams. Bookstores are currently filled with tempting titles that I have, so far, been able to resist.

As for nonfiction, there are almost as many books about books. So Many Books by Gabriel Zaid was published in Spanish in 1996. It was translated into English in 2003. I own the 2025 edition. In other words, we readers still want to read it because it is about what we like read about — books and the people, like us, who read them.

Consider some of the books about books I have read and written about here: 13 Ways of Looking at the Novel by Jane Smiley, Books Promiscuously Read by Heather Cass White, In Praise of Good Bookstores by Jeff Deutsch, So Many Books So Little Time by Sara Nelson, Browsings by Michael Dirda, A Reader's Manifesto by B. R. Myers, Ruined by Reading by Lynn Sharon Schwartz, The Joy of Books by Eric Burns and Phantoms on the Bookshelves by Jacques Bonnel, among others.

So why, other than flattery, should we be cautious about books about books? It is too easy to be taken in by a title. This may especially be true of novels. Just because fiction is set in a bookstore or a library doesn't mean it will be something worth reading. This is true of genres of all kinds. Just because you like westerns (or romances or sci-fi or mysteries) does not mean that all westerns, etc. are worth reading. And it seems to me that books about books have become a genre all their own.

UFOs and donuts

Joe R. Lansdale turns out one entertaining novel after another, yet somehow flies under the radar of most readers. His The Donut Legion (2022) is another enjoyable experience.

As the title suggests, the novel is a bit off the wall. There's a ghost, flying saucers, a killer chimpanzee and, of course, lots of donuts.

Charlie Garner is visited one night by his beautiful ex-wife, Meg. Yet it soon becomes clear that she was never really there, although a hint of her perfume remains. When he goes looking for her, he discovers that both she and her new husband have disappeared. Did she somehow get mixed up in a nearby flying saucer cult, into which both people and large sums of money seem to be disappearing?

With assistance from his brother, Felix, a private investigator; Cherry, his brother's girlfriend and an attorney; and Scrappy, a pretty woman pretending to be a newspaper reporter who soon proves she deserves that nickname, Charlie begins digging into what's really going on inside that cult.

This proves to be dangerous business, even after they enlist the local chief of police in their campaign. As for the donuts, it seems the cult gets much of its money from a string of donut shops.

The novel proves to be fun, even as bodies keep piling up.

Saving our schools

Charles Dickens

Nowadays computers and iPhones outnumber books in so many American classrooms. It is no coincidence that reading scores have dropped and so few young people read books. They may read social media, but not Austen, Dickens or Twain.

So many teachers don't even assign books to their students. Instead assignments require reading just a few pages. The potential impact is tremendous — the loss of mental skills, a decline in the ability to hold jobs and a shrinkage of western heritage. At one time most people knew at least something about Animal Farm, Huck Finn and To Kill a Mockingbird.

Salvation may depend more on state legislators than on educators. Mark Bauerlein and Stanley Kurtz are pushing legislation they call the BOOKS (Books Optimize Our Kids' Schools) Act. This would require English teachers to assign at least two books per semester to their students. Half of these books must have been published before 1900, meaning that students would be required to tackle something written by the likes of Shakespeare, Alcott, Thoreau and Homer.

For us older folks, that sounds like a normal and good education.  To too many students today it sounds impossible. This explains why so many parents are turning to home schooling, private schools and charter schools to educate their young. If Bauerlein and Kurtz have their way in a few state legislatures, even public school students may start doing better.

Miss Kopp rides again

Amy Stewart's Constance Kopp novels make compulsive reading, and Miss Kopp Just Won't Quit (2018) ranks with the best in the series.

Six-foot-tall Constance Kopp, based on an actual person, is the first female deputy sheriff in Hackensack, New Jersey, in the years just before America enters World War I. She takes care of the female prisoners and sometimes spends the night in her own cell. Yet as a woman in a man's world, she is always newsworthy and even controversial. especially now that it is an election year. The election of a new sheriff could jeopardize her fledgling career.

Yet that is a mere subplot here. The title's real significance applies to her determination to help a housewife whose husband routinely sends her to a mental asylum. Charged with taking the woman to the institution, Constance becomes convinced there is nothing mentally wrong with Mrs. Kayser. Although told to back off because it is not her responsibility to question a judge's order, she nevertheless pursues justice for this woman, even to to the point of getting an attorney and a private investigator.

Meanwhile her home life once again proves entertaining. Her sister, Norma, remains all business, always busy and totally committed to getting the Army to use her carrier pigeons when they go to France. Her other sister (actually her secret daughter), Fleurette, remains flighty, gifted at making clothing but more interested in singing and dancing.

This novel doesn't end with a bang, but rather peters out, but keep in mind that it is fiction based on true events.

Novel relationships

Every novel. every narrator can't help offering the promise of a relationship.

Jane Smiley, 13 Ways of Looking at the Novel

Relationships are important to all of us — friends, lovers, families, even store clerks and those working in medical offices whom we see periodically. But novels or the narrators of novels? Can we have meaningful relationships with them?

Jane Smiley

I like that Jane Smiley, in making the statement above, clarifies it with the phrase "offering the promise of a relationship." This promise is not fulfilled in every novel or in every narrator. Some novels we read and soon forget. Of course, that also may be true of some human relationships. First dates don't always lead to second dates. Even close friendships can evaporate quickly after one person moves away.

I think something very much like a relationship can develop while one is engrossed in a novel. The same is true of movies, of course. We become invested in the story. The words and actions of the characters matter to us. We want to give them advice: Don't open that door. Don't believe what he's saying. Kiss her, you fool.

Some fictional relationships can last longer than many real human relationships. Why do we keep some novels on our shelves long after we have finished reading them or why do we want to read some novels again and again?  It's because the relationship isn't over.

Fun with English

Patricia T. O'Conner formerly worked for the New York Times, helping writers and reporters clean up their prose, but perhaps she might have been been more at home at the New York Post.

The Post is known for its fun-filled and pun-filled headlines, A recent issue, for example, had headlines like "AND THE DRESS IS HISTORY," about Melania Trump's inaugural gown being donated to the Smithsonian, and "Snow way! More white stuff for us?" about another predicted storm for New York City.

If you can enjoy the Post for its headlines, you might enjoy Origins of the Specious by O'Conner and Stewart Kellerman (2009) for its subheads (and a lot more). For example:

"Wake My Day" — Should we say "I woke" or "I waked" or "I have woken" or "I have waked" or "I have woke"? I have been a writer for most of my life, but I am still confused by that one. O'Conner, in her always witty and informative fashion, sets us straight. Any will do.

"A Niche in Time" — What is the proper way to pronounce the word niche? Should it be NITCH or NEESH? She says NITCH, thank goodness. Only snobs say NEESH.

"Ivory League" — Here she digs into the question of why we use the term "ivory tower" to refer to the intellectual elite. She gives us quite a history of the phrase, beginning with the Song of Solomon, where we can find, "Thy neck is as a tower of ivory." She moves on to Mary McCarthy's 1963 novel The Group," which include the sentence, "We called you the Ivory Tower group."

"Axe, and It Shall Be Given" — Here she delves into the question of why so many people, especially black Americans, pronounce the word ask as axe. Guess what! This goes back to England hundreds of years ago. Chaucer, for example, wrote, "a man that ... cometh for to axe him of mercy."

O'Conner, with Kellerman's assistance, makes the language fun.