If there’s one thing about which I frustrate myself it is the constant looking for books. Not even so much the reading (or the shortcomings thereof), but the search. We all know readers who leave books half read (or even more so in the age of the cheap Kindle deal, unread).
I admit that my desire to find something so random has even led me in the past to use a method by which a numbers generator on the internet picked my books for me (it was a complicated system of my devising and that I used once or twice, but to which I couldn’t dedicate myself so wholeheartedly after it offered me a completely bizarre and unappealing book translated out of German).
But in the past year or so, it seems I’ve come upon a better way.
I must start though by saying I haven’t finished reading a book since Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children a few months back. And my reason for finishing it was quite simple: I loved it. But I didn’t find it through careful study or numbers divination. I was hooked on Rushdie by a completely whimsical pickup in the library one day. Not of Midnight’s Children, a wonderful book in its own right (and prize-winning at that). Midnight’s Children was only the suggestion of a friend – a suggestion that I couldn’t find at my library. So I picked the next book that caught my eye: not Rushdie’s more famous (or infamous?) work, The Satanic Verses, but rather a smaller and less notorious book down the shelf, Two Years Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights. And I was not disappointed. I loved the language. I loved the familiarity and creativity of the story. I loved the way he wrote. And while one of my beloved sisters would say, “Nope. Too wordy,” I would not be deterred. I mean, she feels the same about one of the best books ever written: The Expedition of Humphry Clinker by Tobias Smollett.
And Clinker was where it began for me.
I must say now that I never “got” the best-loved books™ deal. I mean, I’ve heard others talk about their “list of favorites,” but nothing really hit the spot with me. Nothing until I stumbled upon Mr. Clinker sitting on an out-of-the-way shelf in a Madison, Wisconsin used book store.
And why did I pick it up? Careful thought? No. The author’s fame? I mean, who knew that Smollett was one of the first and possibly best translators of Don Quixote into English? But…no.
I picked it up because I was attracted by its size. It was old and comfortable, printed in the 1940s, and it fit so easily in the span of my hand. And anyway, I was on my way to a hockey game that night and it fit so well into the cargo pocket of the pants I was wearing.
Random.
And so it is, at a time when I can count my reading progress to simultaneously include at least four physical books and an audiobook, I picked up yet another — a book by Thomas Wolfe called Look Homeward Angel. A book that I heard about in passing on a Netflix binge.
And I was hooked by his “note to the reader” before the book even began; and more so by nearly every word in the many pages since.
So perhaps there’s something to be said for pure randomness in the finding of books we may love. My own list is now at three…maybe four, and of course I’m hoping it grows even more. But, not to be spoiled, I should be content with the ones I’ve found so far. Should future pursuit be fruitless I know that I can certainly go back to them and love them even more.
