My Love of Books

I love books, and I always have. When I was 10 or 12 years old, I can’t remember the exact year, I hid beneath my bed to finish reading Terry Brooks’s The Sword of Shannara. No one could find me. I was lost in a world of wizards, elves, and quests. It was magical, my preadolescent sublime.

I think I may have loved the fact that the book was over 700 pages as much as I liked the story. I loved how “thick” it was, how it felt in my hands, and how the book bent differently as I read more of it (as if I had earned its trust and it opened for me). When I finally finished it, I felt a sense of accomplishment. A world had been revealed to me and I submitted to it. I felt larger and more expansive, and Moss Point became a little smaller. How could the mundane life of this small gulf coast town compare to the dark forces bearing down on the Four Lands?

A love affair with books had begun.

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I recently attended the New Orleans Book Festival. The tag line of the festival is “a Mardi Gras for the mind.” Books were everywhere. Panels, conversations, great company along with wonderful weather and the spirit of New Orleans made the days pass by too quickly. I didn’t do it but imagine me second-lining with a book in hand, smiling, as the folks back home would say, like a “chess cat.” I was in my happy place. Surrounded by books, talking about books, and meeting interesting people who loved books, too.

Of course, the horrors of the times cast shadows. Wars, elections, Trump. Earnest exchanges and explanations filled rooms, but those conversations did not overwhelm. And even when they did, I still had the comforting presence of books—a reminder of a place of retreat like the clandestine space underneath my bed in a room wallpapered with airplanes where my imagination soared.

I think this is why I love to surround myself with books. A portable haven, of sorts. I want books around me. I want to lay eyes on the covers. I want to be able to randomly pick one up and to return to something I have already read.

In primary school we had these reading competitions. You would list all the books you had read over a certain period. I would write down every title—the books I read, the books I was going to read, the books I wanted to read but couldn’t buy. My classmates would say, accusingly, that I hadn’t read all those books. I would shrug my shoulders. It didn’t matter. I was collecting and curating. I guess it was a foreshadow of what was to come.

When I was a graduate student at Princeton, I remember walking into Cornel West’s office and books were everywhere. They poured out of the walls and surrounded his desk as if they had a life of their own. He turned the covers of particular books around to face you. You had this amazing juxtaposition: the vastness of Cornel’s mind and personality along with the images of his favorite thinkers and favorite books. Stepping into the office was like stepping into a sanctuary. Sacred space. Imagine. Every wall covered with books from floor to ceiling. All of them dog eared, neatly annotated with his felt-tip pen, and underlined passages with his signature exclamation points.

Once, and I doubt he remembers this, Cornel wanted to show me a book while we talked in his cramped office in Dickinson Hall. I believe it was by Hubert Harrison, but I might be wrong. As you get older, your memories often betray you. You grab hold of what you can and treasure the fragments anyway. He couldn’t immediately find the book. It was somewhere on the bottom shelf of his office library. He got on all fours. I bent down beside him and we looked around. “There it is!” he said with excitement. He smiled that beautiful gap-tooth smile, and he opened the book to the passage he wanted me to see. I don’t remember what he read. And it really doesn’t matter. We dwelled among his books—that book, and that felt like a piece of heaven on earth.

Not all of my books are dog-eared and annotated, and I am ok with that. Thanks to friends in a reading group, I came across this word, tsundoku, a Japanese practice of buying books and letting them pile up. It’s a wonderful way of accounting for my habit of ordering books, roaming bookstores, and buying books that I probably won’t read immediately. Books that catch the eye. Works that will, one day, perhaps, find their way into my hands. Shelves of potential reading. Signs of taste evolving, of something in me changing. Books in waiting. Me, becoming.

I have to teach James Baldwin’s The Evidence of Things Not Seen this week. I have read the book more times than I can remember. My annotations are layered like thick paint on a canvas, impasto style. Each time something new jumps off the page. Each time I wonder what I was thinking when I wrote whatever I wrote in the margins that now makes little sense to me.

Of course, life colors the eyes. A lot has happened between the readings of the book not only in the world, but in my experience with other books. American bombs fall yet again. I just finished Min Jin Lee’s latest novel (it is brilliant) and Dalmon Galgut’s The Promise (it is brilliant, too). So, my eyes and ears are attuned a bit differently to what Baldwin is up to with form.

I love that about books. They are like little universes where time folds in on itself. Literary cosmic origami.

Eventually, on that day hidden from everyone, I had to come out of my make-shift cave. After finishing Terry Brooks’s book in the dim light underneath my bed, I had a terrible headache. I cried as I told my mom. “Nobody told you to read all them pages in the dark,” she said with a slight smile that betrayed her tone as she reached for aspirin. She was right. Nobody told me. No one needs to tell me, still. Books are my happy place.

Maybe I will pull Brooks off the shelf and read him again. I am 57 now. What will that world read like with these eyes?

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