My Book Purgatory
I’m a recent convert from IRL reading to e-reading, and I’m already finding that my iPad replicates the original experience so closely that I’m starting to accumulate a digital book purgatory, just like my IRL book purgatory.
What’s a book purgatory? It’s the land of books that are waiting to ascend to the state of having been read. If you’re a regular reader, you have one—real, digital, or both.
My digital book purgatory only has a couple of inhabitants, and I’ve at least started both of them: David Foster Wallace’s The Pale King, which demands the kind of tolerance for the detailed description of life’s minutae that I can only rarely summon; and Neil Gaiman’s American Gods, which reads like a children’s book where people get eaten by giant vaginas. American Gods will probably at some point get polished off—I mean, come on, giant man-eating vaginas!—but I’ve accepted the fact that I may go to my own grave without ever having finished The Pale King.
I’ve been working on my IRL book purgatory for a lot longer, and it contains…I don’t even want to count. Hundreds of books? Maybe thousands? I keep most of them hidden away at my parents’ house, where they can’t stare me down. How did they all get there? How did I come to own so many books that I’ve never read, and probably never will? Well, let’s see...
Gifts. Woody Allen fans will recognize The Denial of Death as the thick paperback that Alvy Singer awkwardly presents to Annie Hall. Jay Gabler fans—I know you’re out there—may also recognize it as a book that’s been sitting on my shelf since some time in the 20th century. It was a gift from my uncle, who found it meaningful. I would genuinely like to read it, but…whew. Then there are the gifts I asked for, like the companion volume to Matthew Barney’s Cremaster series of art films. I’m not throwing it away! Ever! Someday I’ll read it! Really!
Sales. DAMN YOU, HALF-PRICE BOOKS! You make me spend money on books I want to read, but never will. Now I have less money, less shelf space, and more guilt. And yet you sit there on Ford Parkway, taunting me! Why are you still in business? Oh, that’s right…BECAUSE I’VE SPENT LIKE FIVE MILLION DOLLARS AT YOU. On books I’ll never read, and never throw away.
College classes. Anyone else still have that history of the world from 1500-500 BCE that they paid $45 to buy for that one class freshman year, but never read because you were watching Nightmare Before Christmas and staying up all night trying to throw pens through the hole in the billowing curtain? I mean, it’s probably a really good book! Right? It’s not like I’m just going to throw it away.
Short-lived interests. I used to be really into sci-fi. I also used to be really into classical music. Then there was that time I was really into short stories. And wow, there were those years when I wanted to learn everything I could about art history. Classic young adult fiction? Yeah, that was a thing with me for a while. And I still have all. Those. Books.
Hand-me-downs. I’m not just going to throw away my grandfather’s books, right? I could give them to another family member, I suppose, but would my cousins treat them as well as I do—cherish them and occasionally dust them and never, ever actually read them.
Series. If you get one volume of Isaac Asimov’s autobiography, it’s not like you’re going to wait to actually read it before you buy the other two volumes, right? Because that would just be silly.
So there they all languish: all the beautiful, fascinating, endlessly patient inhabitants of my book purgatory. They may remain there until the end of the world…but on the bright side, a lot of people say that’s actually coming pretty soon!
Guest blogger Jay Gabler is arts editor at the Twin Cities Daily Planet and an editor at The Tangential.
3 Comments
Reader Comments (3)
Hahahahaha. Brilliant. I was very lucky to think that when I went off and did a master's degree in England that I would in fact be staying FOREVER, so I sold or donated A LOT of books. It was hard to see them go. But my desire for minimalism and an overseas move won out. In the end I came back and have slowly started rebuilding my purgatory and just the other day started my ebook purgatory, but I'm going to read them, I swear.
Oh man. Totally feeling this post. The "I Worked In Book Publishing" book purgatory is the worst. You are not paying for the books, and you feel like you just should take them because you are not getting paid enough anyway. A galley copy of a novel about a man walking around drinking and screwing hookers in Manhattan and failing at life? That seems like a completely original gem that everyone should totally own, when it's free on your employer's bookshelf. Maybe you're picking up the next big thing, and nobody else knows it! Then you read two pages and realize there was a reason it was on the Free shelf. And the worst thing is that used bookstores don't even take galley copies, so that you can't even sell them back, so they live on your bookshelf. Sigh.
There's also the "total ambitious theory nerd" purgatory, which is when you really like literary and historical theory when you have to read it for school, so you get a bunch of extra literary theory, but... unless you are a scholar, casually reading literary theory isn't really what anyone does. So you have all these theory books (and damn those things are pricey) but they never get read, they just sit there waiting to be impressive for anyone pretentious you might entertain.
I haven't read American Gods since it was first published and I devoured it in a single sitting. I've been meaning to do so now. I'll be honest, there are two things I don't remember about it: it being like a children's book, and man eating vaginas. I do recall at the time thinking that it was the best thing Gaiman had ever written, period. I have no idea now, I'm a better reader and writer than I was ten years ago, so I wanted to revisit it.
As for The Pale King, I'm surprised people wanted to read this. Brief Interviews with Hideous Men was already unreadable. And he never even finished Pale King. And it's about boredom. Remember how entertaining his book on entertainment (Infinite Jest), was? Don't get me wrong, I was entertained by it. But it took me forever to read. And some parts were boring.
I had never thought of all the books I've acquired as being in purgatory, but yes, you're correct. And I have too many literary theory, western philosophy, pop science and school inspired non-fiction books that I will probably never read. DFW's history of Zero. Hardt & Negri's Empire. All those damn books on string theory. Malcolm Gladwell.