Random Reading

"What are the books at your bedside?"

It's a common question. I've asked it myself, for want of a better. It's meant, among the bookish, to do the work of a "Cosmo" quiz, a "personality profile," or "a line" in a bar. The books at one's bedside tend to be treasures, as well as what's actually meant to be read on any given night; not just the evening's refreshment, but the leaves left at the bottom for telling.

Lazy bugger that I am, after being off work already three days, I've only just today addressed the mountain of laundry threatening to overwhelm us. I've run the dishwasher and put out the trash, (sorted now ever more carefully, due to new rules, so that shrimp tails and banana skins must have their own kitchen bin.) I've opened windows and aired the bedroom for the first time this Spring, despite the persistent chill. (This last must be done before A. comes home from his job, as he will otherwise "freeze to death!" and we wouldn't want that.) My morning looked to be productive. But I made a misstep. My sainted mother taught me never to make a trip upstairs or down with empty hands, so, having put away a load of blankets, and finding myself in just such a condition, I made the mistake of clearing some books off my nightstand to return them to my library.

This sort of thing may only be done properly when one is expecting guests, when one, in other words, is motivated by altruism or shame, or when one has a serious need of cash. To flippantly lift books from a stack so long undisturbed, unleashes not just sneeze-inducing dust, but a dangerous, long-dormant curiosity. As I'm already reading, when I ought not, a novel in verse by Arthur Hugh Clough, it isn't wise to be reminded that I am already reading Adam Bede. What besides?

That's the thing about bedside reading, at least at my bedside, there is always more of it than there are hours in the evening. Unlike daylight reading, which might more properly be done on the bus, or at lunch, or dinner, when one ought to be working (ahem,) or just come home, books to be read in bed tend to two general categories: 1) books to be continued and 2) books to be thumbed. It is the latter that tend to crowd. Like most readers of novels, I pick them up and put them down and carry them around with me, always intending to finish one before I start another. This almost never happens, of course. Working in a bookstore makes such sustained interest all but impossible. Too many new books, too many choices, good and bad, for any one book to hold me at full length. And yet, I still intend to finish Villette, if it kills me. I have no issue though with running Charlotte Bronte and George Eliot in tandem. In addition to these, there are the reader's copies, delivered by mail, to be considered by me, as a member of a prize committee. Were these not added to my nightstand, I might never remember to so much as look at the damned things. But it is the books to be thumbed, as I've said, that really mount up over time. It is the biographies and histories, the books with pictures, the anthologies of essays and poetry, of criticism and reminiscence, that tend to be considered one night, or at most two, before my eye falls elsewhere and I'm distracted. Rebecca West's 1900, while purchased who knows how long ago, is perhaps the best example of just such a book. I've browsed it with pleasure. Wouldn't know it, from the inch of dust on it now. How long has it been down there, at the bottom of the bottom stack, placed there for reasons of weight and size rather than disinterest. No idea.

Then there are my more constant companions: the last volume of Charles Lamb's letters and Montaigne's essays, which almost never leave. The idea of neither gentleman being near at hand, should I feel the need of them, makes me no little anxious, so that even when I come to clean properly some day, these two books at least will be put back promptly after dusting, where they belong, and so form the base, as it were, for future construction.

But having disturbed the established order, having carried a stack, one solitary pile, only so far as the floor of this room, before falling to and spending no less than an hour reviewing, reading and remembering why I wanted to have Andre Gide's company one night two months ago -- anticipating a possible choice for the book club -- I quite forgot the laundry and the research I'd started. I've only just heard the dryer shut off. And now it's time for lunch, and a few pages more of Clough. I made a note last night of a very early passage from Amours de Voyage, wherein an Englishman abroad detailed his disappointment in Rome. The passage, in part, now seems perfectly apt for the present and usual state of my books, and my place in the muddle:

"Somehow a tyrannous sense of a superincumbent oppression
Still, wherever I go, accompanies ever, and makes me
Feel like a tree (shall I say?) buried under a ruin of brickwork."

But then, I built my own ruin in books, and I'm frankly as happy in it as I am ever likely to be. "Superincumbent oppression" it may be, but easy to carry, one brick at a time.

And now, I really must fold underwear and make a sandwich or something. (Why am I suddenly hungry?) Claude, in Canto Two, was crowing "Victory! Victory! -- Yes!" at the barricades when I left him last night on the nightstand. Now then, where did I put Amours de Voyage?