Phthursday Musings: Wrapped Up In Books

I have given no advanced thought to this, but consider this week a list of book recommendations for your spouse / child / parent / weird weird neighbor. Oh, I sneak some non-book things in too. Don’t you worry.

In 2008 I started a job which involved taking the train to work. This was before the phone was completely distracting, and I was able to settle in to reading on the train.

In 2009, I started keeping logs of books I’ve read. (I also log concerts - I’ve built that log back a lot longer - and recently I’ve tried to reconstruct a log of sporting events.) The logs are broken out by years and some years I logged a lot more than others. But it’s interesting to look back, and then to consider books I read even longer ago, and think about which ones still resonate with me over time. My conceit here will be to look at one book that I happened to read in each of 2009, 2012, 2015, 2018, 2021.

Most links to books here are going to be to publisher pages. If I manage to convince you to get your hands on any of these, please please please do not buy them from Amazon. Go the library or do what I do now and order them from a bookstore. I tend to order from Raven Bookstore in Lawrence, a city I’ve never even been to, because Katie told me that was her favorite bookstore, and that’s reason enough. More about Raven below though.

My log was long in 2009 - 62 books - some of which were very short (some children’s books I’d never read) and some of which were… not short (like Gravity’s Rainbow.)

I notice a lot of things very different from anything I’ve read recently. I see One Hundred Years of Solitude, I see multiple Eugene Ionesco plays, I see a book called Within the Context of No Context by George W. S. Trow and for the life of me I can’t remember what the hell that was about. I see Kafka, I see Faulkner, I see Wilde.

The one that seems to linger though is Jorge Luis Borges’s Collected Fictions.

Borges was an Argentinian writer, best known for short stories, and he like Gabriel García Márquez and other Latin American writers are associated with magical realism. What I remember about the actual stories is that they were often about the gauchos (skilled horsemen) of northern Argentina and Uruguay, but unlike American westerns I’m familiar with, there was a mystical component. There was a mood unlike any other mood I’d encountered in writing, like Borges was in touch with something, but wasn’t really setting the terms for what he was in touch with or how he was accessing it. I think Borges held insight into the human condition that few chroniclers have. It is long overdue for me to revisit him.

We moved in 2011 and then in 2012 I had a new job. Late 2011 must be when I got my first iPhone, because in 2012, my reading list is all of one book long.

This curious volume was The American Revolution: A Grand Mistake by Leland Stauber. Stauber was a professor emeritus at Southern Illinois University, and the book had been recommended by my pal Charlie. Alas, I finally got to the book just after Leland Stauber passed away, so I never got to ask him just how he came up with such a provocative thesis.

Stauber asserts that if America had simply been less impetuous, more patient, and more realistic, that we would have eventually had an independent country without having had to do it the way we did, which baked into the American way a distrust and distaste for government. He argues we need look no farther than Canada for a counterexample - a free country where a sensible transition eventually took place; where there’s a far better relationship between the people and the police; where there’s not the same kind of pervasive gun culture and extreme obsession with individual liberty.

You don’t need to buy into the argument to find it thoroughly thought-provoking. And as it so happened, it was the first time I’d ever read a comparative analysis of the development of American and Canadian civic culture. This is something people talk about a lot but I’ve never heard any American actually speak to this as something they’ve read about.

Maybe Stauber’s base argument is nonsense. But it’s still the sort of thing where just seriously considering it is worth your time.

In 2015 I changed jobs again, and started working from home. On the one hand, transit was the way I found time to read. On the other, not spending time in transit freed a lot of time up - if, indeed, I was not in the throes of some kind of reader’s block like I had been in 2012.

My 2015 list has 15 titles, and I recognize some of them as having been read on my wife’s old school Kindle, including Keith Richards’s Life. (Why did we read that on a Kindle again?) The list seems to be dominated by books having something to do with Chicago. Ahh, but I see one which definitely jumps out.

I was far too late to the party on Studs Terkel, knowing him by reputation without grasping but the narrowest essence of the man. Studs was a man with a rare and astonishing gift. All people have stories. There are so many wonderful stories to be shared by everyday people. But most people with extraordinary stories are not extraordinary storytellers… unless they tell their stories to Studs Terkel.

For years Studs was a disc jockey in Chicago. He would play opera, he would play classical, he would play gospel, he would play whatever compelled him at the moment. He has been credited - though he took no such credit - for discovering, or perhaps more accurately, for broadcasting Mahalia Jackson. He was, in short, a tremendous listener. But he was more than that. He could pick up on things and steer conversations - not to where he wanted them to go, but to where the conversations themselves wanted to go.

And They All Sang is my favorite Studs Terkel book. It is a collection of on air interviews he conducted with the most legendary musicians of his time: Louis Armstrong, Leonard Bernstein, Bob Dylan, Janis Joplin, and of course Mahalia Jackson. And they all had fascinating things to say, and, in many cases, it was clear that Studs had tapped into a strain of conversation they’d never before explored.

It is hard to imagine leading a more fascinating life than the life that Studs Terkel lived. To imagine being in the room and part of these conversations is itself a story that boggles the imagination.

What even happened in 2018? We were talking about moving but hadn’t moved yet. I had a little boy in preschool but goodness if I don’t seem to be able to associate any particular memory to the number 2018.

We did take the most wonderful excursion that year, seeing the elaborate Leonard Cohen exhibit at the Musée d'art contemporain in Montreal. I also that year read the collection Leonard Cohen on Leonard Cohen: Interviews and Encounters. If you’re steeped in all things Leonard but have never gotten around to this, you should definitely track it down.

The book which I think I will keep coming back to though is Robert Bray’s Reading With Lincoln. Abraham Lincoln, self-taught lawyer, to many people America’s greatest President, someone who seemingly never should have gotten to such a level, someone who by all accounts kept learning and growing up until the very end. But what does all that actually mean in practice? Well, it means that here was a boy and then a young man who got his hands on whatever he could and devoured it. And what those things are tell a really fascinating meta-story not just about Lincoln but arguably about the very concept of learning.

There are untold hundreds of books about Lincoln and you can hunt down whatever bias you choose and dig into whatever arcane detail you want and that’s all fine and well. Bray’s book was one of the few times I really felt like I was getting an understanding of how Lincoln developed as opposed to what such development might mean. I’m firmly in the camp of people who feel that Lincoln was continuing to evolve on race and other matters throughout his time in the White House, and further that such evolution is a more important thing to grasp than any particular point on the curve. Some people don’t really change - they just become more and more stuck in their ways - but other people absolutely do change, a great deal even, and that is a wonderful thing to consider in our own lives, the potential for continuous growth.

This year I think I’m going to get through 14 or 15 books, most of them clumped toward the beginning of the year, and then a couple in December. It’s been hard most of this year to get into a reading mindset around 9pm. It’s been this way before - one book in all of 2012! - but I’m sure hoping to break out of it.

If I go back to the dozens and dozens of other books from the preceding 12 years and then ask what’s the strangest entry for this year, I think it’d have to be Modern in the Middle: Chicago Houses 1929-1975 by Susan S. Benjamin & Michelangelo Sabatino. It’s a survey of prominent “modern” homes in the greater Chicago area from Frank Lloyd Wright forward. Many of them what would often be called “mid-century modern” and while I feel like I miss pieces of the pure architectural discussion, I nevertheless find myself drawn. I don’t think of myself as an early adopter, and I cringe at the idea of “disruptors” in the market, but I am very much enamored with the notion that we simply don’t have to keep doing things the same way, that we can innovate, that we can experiment, that we can be deliberate, that we can make choices that are off menu. Would I actually want to live in something like the Edith Farnsworth House? I mean, I’m sure it’d be fun for a minute:

It’s the idea of expanding one’s thinking about what our spaces could be like, not necessarily wanting to live in them.

And I think this is something where I can connect a survey of modern residential architecture back to all of the others. Borges wrote of things beyond what we might normally perceive, by channeling the open space around us but also by exploring the inner space of the mind. Stauber wrote what is in essence a counterfactual work, a way of reconsidering what our country might have been - and perhaps might yet be. Bray gave us a different angle to considering growth and what we might achieve. The works of architecture and the narrative Benjamin and Sabatino offer about them suggest an expansion of thought in the basest of our daily existences - our homes - which also begs the question of what else might be so easily taken for granted when it can be challenged and pushed forward. And Terkel, well, what Studs has demonstrated in so many works is how we all have stories inside looking for greater expression.

We’re all human here. There are innumerable nuisances that attend the human condition. But we are remiss if we simply settle for what we’re told, if we simply accept everything we see at face value. Whether it’s a collection of Argentinian fiction or a survey of residential architecture, books can serve not just to expand thinking, but indeed to establish the basis for even more expanded thinking. Whatever exactly this human trek is that we’re on, we’re on it, so let’s keep moving forward.

As a footnote, the observant META-SPIEL reader will know that the subject this week is lifted directly from the song “Wrapped Up In Books” off of Belle and Sebastian’s 2003 album Dear Catastrophe Waitress, subsequently released on the Books EP the following year. There’s a video for “Wrapped Up In Books”:

On the Books EP you’ll also find my favorite Belle and Sebastian song, “Your Cover’s Blown”. Thanks to sleuthing around tonight it turns out there’s a remix of the song I wasn’t aware of and a video to accompany the remix!

Is this as mind expanding as Jorge Luis Borges or Studs Terkel? Maybe, maybe not. But a world where we can’t dance? No thank you!