Old Books
After years of procrastination, I recently hired a carpenter to make several bookshelves. Once they were made, I took out books that I had stored in cartons – some for a decade - and filled the shelves with them. It was an experience of unexpected joy and self-discovery.
As I was organizing the books and looking through them many thoughts crowded my head.
Books have always been a big part of my life. Going to the bookstore, browsing through books, smelling them, and eventually bringing some home – these have added comfort and excitement to my life. But books are also an open-ended quest. Who is to say what the ultimate goal is? Is it to enjoy a story? Expand my mind and skills? Insert myself into a world created by a storyteller?
Like others, I have gone through phases. My old books made that clear. There was the ideological phase of student days, reflected in works by Fanon, Said, and others. There was a literature phase: Joyce, Beckett, Steinbeck, Carver, Bowles. There was a phase of reading letters and essays, including those of Syed Mujtaba Ali, Steinbeck, Montaigne, White, Plutarch. For some years I enjoyed travel writing by Theroux, Bryson, O'Hanlon, Danziger and others. More recently, reflecting my interest in birds and wildlife, I have read about the natural world in books by Abbey, Leopold, Audobon, Muir.
Among my old books I found photography monographs, photography collections of a mix of photographer, and essays on photography. I collected these consistently over the last four decades. Some photography essays have come to be considered classics, for example, those by Berger, Sontag, and Barthes. Others which were instant hits upon publication now look dated. These books are usually polemical, championing social or political issues of the time. Individual photographers – and their monographs - have come and gone at the whim of critics, curators and photographic kingmakers.
Some books also take me through phases in an author's life. For example, Paul Theroux, the renowned travel writer, whose early books such as The Great Railway Bazaar created excitement because they represented the world before globalization when it was hard to reach many places. Over the years the world became easier to travel in. Theroux kept on choosing difficult routes, but he also became increasingly cynical. Bill Bryson burst in with A Walk in the Woods, about a long hike on the Appalachian Trail. Then he went on to write about a wide variety of topics.
I always bought more than I could read. As a result I have dozens of unread books lying in my shelves. Why did I not read them? Some were hard going and I was hesitant to start – mostly Classics. Sometimes I bought so many books at once that I forgot about some. Some books are unread because they are bad. I keep wondering why they are still here in my bookshelf. Mysteriously, I found double copies of some authors I liked, such as Henning Mankell or Ray Carver.
As an added bonus, fast-moving thrillers or detective books, read in one night many years ago, are as good as new because I have forgotten the stories.
For the younger generation today, electronic books and social media are more exciting than paper books. But for me, nothing will ever replace good old-fashioned books made of paper.
facebook.com/ikabirphotographs or follow "ihtishamkabir" on Instagram.
Comments