Reading in Stacks
First it should be said that I didn’t used to have books
on my beside table. I didn’t used to have a bedside
table. When I lived alone—which I did until I was in
my late thirties—I just kept whatever I was reading
right in bed with me. I slept in the middle with lots of books
on both sides. (I’ve always liked to be reading a lot
of books at the same time. Some nights I dip—half an
hour of Roth, half an hour of Henry James, half an hour of
Mary Gordon—and some nights I just reach for the one
I’m in the mood for and stick with it till I fall asleep.
I have never minded the way the stories get mixed up with
one another; actually, I like it. It’s like
being at a loud party with a lot of interesting conversations
going on at the same time.)
Even in those (carefree, it seems now) days I did most of my reading in bed because there never seemed to be time during the day. However, for the last thirteen years there has been a man in my bed and right from the beginning he objected to the books, which he said hurt him when he rolled over on to them. (He also objected to my eating popcorn in bed, but I never stopped doing that. There are limits to what you can give up to marriage.) The sad truth was: there was no room in my old queen-sized bed for him and all those books.
Our first Christmas/Chanukah together, he built me a piece of furniture for my side of the bed. He made a list of everything I said I needed in a bedside table and built me the perfect thing, the ideal thing—a combination bedside table/bookcase/dresser/curio cabinet. It met every one of my needs.
The books that are stacked up there fall into three categories:
1) The ones I’m in the middle of right now.
2) The ones I’ve just finished in the last week or two and loved so much I just can’t bear to put them away yet. (I’m not even sure why, but I need to keep them near, which reminds me of the way I used to be about boyfriends: even after I’d broken up with them, I kept them around for a while, just in case.)
3) The books I am planning to read soon.
I should note: there is no order to these stacks. Books I mean to read soon somehow end up getting mixed into the stack of recently-read-and-too-much-loved, as well as into the I’m-in-the-middle-of-reading stack, though honestly I don’t see how that happens. But then I also don’t see how it can be that no one has folded any laundry in our house in at least two years.
What’s in the stacks today—a partial list:
1) The ones I’m reading now
- Katherine Tanney’s novel Carousel of Progress. I read and liked—a lot—her “Modern Love” column, about the dog she kept (and the husband she didn’t) and wrote to tell her so, because human-dog love has become a particular preoccupation of mine since the publication of my novel Dog last spring, and my discovery that what I was writing about is so common (that is, essentially, a person whose only friend is her dog). I can’t believe I didn’t know I was writing right into the zeitgeist. We marveled over synchronicities: she divorced Glenn; I’m married to Glen; the family in her novel is the Herman family (clearly I was meant to read this book) and, so, we traded novels. It was such a relief to discover that I liked her novel so much—so much, in fact, that the last few nights that’s all I’ve been reading.
- Paul Auster’s The Brooklyn Follies, in bound galleys, sent to me by my beloved friend Joe Mackall, who edits River Teeth and knows that I am crazy about Paul Auster and doesn’t care that other writers are always calling him a poseur.
- Philip Roth’s The Plot Against America, which I cannot seem to get into—though I love Roth almost above all living writers. (Only Alice Munro and J.M. Coetzee give him a run for his money.) My mother bought me this book, bless her, because she knows I adore Roth, but somehow it just isn’t possible for me—yet, anyway—to get really going at it.
- John Gregory Dunne’s Quintana & Friends, a collection of essays in a battered paperback version I found online (see note below re: Joan Didion)
- The bound galleys of Stumbling and Raging, an anthology of “politically inspired stories” that I have a story in—the first short story I’ve written in twenty years. Dave Eggers has a “political” story in there that I love so much I’ve actually reread it already.
2) Done but can’t yet put away
- Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking, which I became so deeply involved in I felt I had to get hold of the essay by Dunne about their daughter—which I could vaguely remember reading years ago, and probably have somewhere around here in an anthology, but who knows where?
- Alison Lurie’s Truth and Consequences. She’s one of my heroes: she manages to do social satire—total mockery, taking her characters apart limb from limb—and yet at the same time draw you in emotionally, so that you’re shaking your head over the follies of these people even as you are rooting for them (kind of the way you feel about your own family).
- JM Coetzee’s Slow Man. I love this book almost beyond reason. I don’t understand why everyone doesn’t love it so much they want to put their heads down and weep.
3) Any day now
- Mary Gaitskill’s Veronica. I have been crazy about her since Bad Behavior.
- T.R. Pearson’s Glad News of the Natural World because I love his writing, am very fond of him personally, and his wife—my agent—is one of my best friends.
- John O’Hara’s From the Terrace because I have a deep abiding and wildly unfashionable (I guess) fondness for O’Hara. I found this book at the Strand when I was there recently mainly to buy up the review copies of one of the books I published last year for cheaper than I can get them from my publisher.
- John Irving’s new novel, which was meant to be poolside reading, last summer, while my kid swam with her friends, but it kept moving to the bottom of the stack as I found other things I was more excited about reading, and we didn’t get to the pool that often last summer, anyway—so it’s probably the next thing destined for the row behind the stacks (those books I’ve been meaning to read or reread for a long time but still haven’t gotten to), right next to Clinton’s autobiography, which was meant to be pool reading the summer before this last one, and is this close to moving to the bookcase in the living room.
There’s more, but that seems illustrative enough. And I swear I haven’t left out anything because I’m ashamed of it—though my friend Andrew Hudgins did his best to make me ashamed of the book on tape that I’ve been “reading” in my car (another place, it occurs to me, where there are stacks): Alan Alda’s autobiography, Never Have Your Dog Stuffed. But I don’t care what anyone says about that, or about him. I have been madly in love with Alan Alda since 1972. When I was nineteen I wrote him a fan letter and he answered it. He typed, “Yours was the nicest letter I have ever received,” and signed it in black felt-tip. I kept it tacked to my bulletin board for over a decade.
Oh! And then there’s the stack on the dining room table where my daughter and I read nightly. That’s where her books and mine mingle very contentedly. Talk about noisy party conversation: Harry Potter meets Henry James as evoked by Colin Tobim, DC Romance comics—which I get for her on Ebay—and Richie Rich [ditto] mixed in with The Southern Review and American Scholar. And then there’s the bathroom…
