Generations
Siegel, Joan I.
THE LAST W O R IF YOU LOVE A BOOK, ABUSE IT Katharine Byrne rare, serious housecleaning effort recently required that I move through the house, taking all the books off the shelves...
...Someone has observed that you should read Dickens when you are very young...
...My first excursion into literary criticism...
...Good guy...
...Mortimer Adler, in How to Read a Book, says that a book is not really yours until you have responded to it with questioning, argument, contradiction...
...Reading as a reverential act, a fond feeling that holds its object in highest esteem, but at a Platonic distance...
...Mean old man...
...One ought to die neither as a victim nor as a fanatic, but as the seafarer who can greet with an equal eye the deep that he is entering and the shore that he must leave...
...You must not deface a book...
...Historical documents: letters and cards used as bookmarks...
...Years later a character turns up as a friend or an enemy...
...McChoakumchild, Aunt Betsy Trotwood, Miss Havisham: I can see them still because of Dickens's skillful depictions and because these were my books and I could write in them if I wanted to...
...End papers written on, margins covered with comments and arguments...
...Blackpool: a dissolute, drunken woman...
...My own comments fight for some open space even at the ends of chapters...
...I read it one long winter when all of our children were very young and I was helping to write a doctoral thesis not my own...
...Deface: To mar...
...This in spite of repeated admonitions, "Never write in a book, nor dog-ear a page, nor set a book face-down on its open pages...
...In Ex Libris, Anne Fadiman notes that there are two ways to love a book...
...disfigure...
...Impossible to choose just one, except, perhaps, these rueful lines, cherished in my old age: "The heart's memory eliminates the bad and magnifies the good, and thanks to the charitable deceptions of nostalgia, we manage to endure the burden of the past...
...Here they are now, shabby and yellowed, my pale-penciled notations barely readable...
...It says here inside the cover of David Copperfield: "Uriah Heep and his mother are discusting creeps and hipacrits...
...Did I identify with the hapless Dorothea who, "while she longed to do work of her own which would be directly beneficent, like the sunshine and the rain," confined herself to a more noble goal: "to help someone who did great works, so that his burden would be lighter...
...Howard's End is all about connections and the difficulty and necessity of establishing them, but here inside the back cover is an ambitious recipe for dying...
...everybody wearing a placard around his neck...
...The end papers and the insides of the covers are covered with quotations that I didn't want to lose...
...What a word...
...No subtleties of characterization here...
...I pick up a falling-apart paperback of Marilynne Robinson's Housekeeping, a book about loss...
...That whole hot summer I measured my own life and hard times against those of David Copperfield...
...Katharine Byrne writes from Chicago...
...Not really...
...And reminds herself that "what has perished need not be lost, for when do we know anything more utterly than when we have lost it...
...When I was ten, the Chicago Daily News offered five volumes of Dickens free to anyone who bought a subscription...
...A grieving woman in Housekeeping knows that moving on requires that she must "perform the rituals of the ordinary as an act of faith...
...Fair-haired child...
...To write in a book can be an act of love or at very least, an effort to understand it...
...Having written these lines inside the cover almost twenty years ago, I remember them...
...Commonweal 3 I May 7,1999...
...In Hard Times the first page lines up the principals and defines each one unequivocally...
...Pushed into a far corner of a bottom shelf is a five-volume set of Dickens...
...spoil the appearance of...
...Mrs...
...Nor can I forget the grandmother's imagining heaven as "a reunion at the other side of a lake, all those you had ever lost gathered there to meet you...
...THE LAST W O R IF YOU LOVE A BOOK, ABUSE IT Katharine Byrne rare, serious housecleaning effort recently required that I move through the house, taking all the books off the shelves where many of them have stood moldering for years, encouraging me to think about each one...
...This copy of Middlemarch has seen hard use...
...or assent and applause...
...Another book I have clearly wanted to hold onto is Gabriel Garcia Marquez's Love in the Time of Cholera...
...Ostensibly all of these were my books, but in an important way only those I had written in really belonged to me...
...I first read it at a time when I was overwhelmed by a loss that seemed insurmountable, blotting out any possibility that I might ever move on from it...
...The books I have really read are interlined and margin-filled with comments...
...My father gave this precious premium to me...
...Stephen Blackpool: an honest, hard-working power-loom weaver...
...I found loving inscriptions from persons gone and not forgotten...
...The other way Fadiman calls "carnal," because it is deep, intimate, personal, sometimes turning into a wrestling match between reader and author...
...Thomas Gradgrind: a selfish, ill-natured whelp...
...Adler believed that if writing in books offends the rule you learned in third grade, you should buy a copy to keep as a piece of furniture and another copy to read...
...Micawber, Little Nell, Mr...
...Bad guy...
Vol. 126 • May 1999 • No. 9
