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August 26, 2008
Rambling essay about books, after two glasses of wine
I'm feeling weirdly guilty and strangely conflicted.
Morgan and Robin are at Burningman, and I'm checking their mail and their cats. I stopped by today on my lunch break. There, arrayed on the bookshelves in chronological order, was the history of my literary life.
I moved to Oregon in March 2001, and when I left Virginia I left a lot of books behind. I've gone back a few times and returned with bulging suitcases of literature, but it's been clear to me for years that some of my favorites had gone missing. Now I know that Morgan stole them.
On the top of a stack of sideways books I saw "Sirens of Titan," an early '90s reprint of the Vonnegut novel, and I remembered how its happy ending made me cry. At $6, it was more than a week's allowance, more than an hour's babysitting pay, but when I finished that book I got on my bike and headed back to the Little Professor Book Store to buy "Cat's Cradle." Its tragic ending made me laugh. That's when I knew that I loved Vonnegut too much to keep buying his books new. I couldn't afford them. I was in high school, on a budget. I bought "Piano Player" next for 25 cents at a used book store. There it was, on Morgan's shelf, right under "Cat's Cradle," right above "Slaughterhouse Five."
In the first half of the '90s when you fell in love with an author you couldn't google him or look him up on wikipedia, so as I worked my way through Vonnegut's corpus that summer I also spent some days at the library reading about his life. School was starting again when I learned that Vonnegut's recurring Kilgore Trout character was modeled on sci fi writer Theodore Sturgeon. I read my first Sturgeon book in the first week of school, then shared it with a friend, and we talked about how weird it was. There it was, "More Than Human," one stack of books over on Morgan's shelf.
There was "Walden Two" next to "The Handmaid's Tale." I read those in 1996, my first term in college, a tutorial on utopias that included some studies of distopic worlds. Did Morgan steal these? I recognized my second-hand imprint of "Walden Two." I wasn't sure if it was the same edition of the Atwood novel.
I wasn't sure if that was my copy of William Gibson's "Idoru," either, or Neal Stephenson's "Cryptonomicon." I was pretty sure that was my Tim Robbins book, but Robbins never blew me away so I didn't care. "The Communist Manifesto," which I've still never read, still had the Grinnell College book store "used book" sticker on its cover. I think another book was one I bought for a linguistics class, even though I never read it, even though I should have.
I felt robbed. Years of reading, hours of babysitting and bike rides to bookstores, my life, arrayed on Morgan's shelves.
After checking the mail and the cats, I left most of the books behind. I grabbed a few important Vonneguts. "Snow Crash," by Neal Stephenson, and also his "In the Beginning Was the Command Line" - because that one was a gift, I felt like I had to bring it back home.
A couple of the books I took with me, however, left me feeling guilty instead of robbed. "A Canticle for Leibowitz." I stole that from my dad years before my brother ever had a chance to steal it from me. My copy was printed in 1968, a decade before I was born. I remember finding it downstairs on the shelves with my parents' books, reading it, and hiding it away with my own favorite tomes.
"Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead." Did I steal that one from my dad or from my mom or from my high school? I know I read it in AP Literature in 12th grade, the cumulative work in a long study of plays. We read "The Frogs" by Aristophanes and learned about humor, then "Hamlet" by Shakespeare and learned about tragedy, then "Waiting for Godot" by Beckett and learned about existentialism, then "Rosencrantz and Guildenstern" and learned about allusion and humor and tragedy and existentialism and how entertaining they can be when they're all wrapped up together. Whoever I stole it from, it was later stolen from me.
I grabbed some of the books that Morgan stole from me, and some of the books that he stole only after I stole them first, but I left his bookshelf mostly full.
I came home and looked at my own shelves. I've paid for the library books I never returned. But not for "Henderson the Rain King," which has my mom's social security number in the cover, her student ID number when she went to college the first time around in the '70s. Not for "Bleak House," which my dad took with him to the hospital the night that I was born. It has contraction times written in the back cover. I'm stealing that one forever. Nobody can have it. I never paid for "The Horse Whisperer," either, which Fatima let me borrow in high school, and which I still haven't read and still haven't returned. I tracked her down on the Internet a few years ago to say hi and to apologize for the theft. She was surprised. No big deal, she said.
I guess that's the thing about books. We're supposed to buy them, to scrounge them, to borrow them forever, to read them, to love them, and to steal them when we have the chance. It's part of loving words so much they drive you crazy.
And that's why I'm feeling guilty and conflicted. How can I resent my brother's theft from me, when some of what he stole I stole from someone else, when upon discovering the theft my first response is to steal it all back? And at the same time, when those books are in my blood, when their words are the building blocks of how I view the world, how can I not resent a theft, although I myself am eager to commit it?
Posted by Courtney_Sherwood at August 26, 2008 09:04 PM
Comments
Funny things, books. When your dad and I visited his best friend who was living in Peoria at the time (1975), Dad found a lot of his own books on Rick's shelves. I even found a few of mine, at least one of which I brought home.
We do love them books.
Love you, Mom
Posted by: Mom at August 27, 2008 04:39 AM
That's hilarious.
Posted by: Courtney at August 27, 2008 07:05 AM
Player Piano, The Sirens of Titan, Slapstick, Slaughterhouse-Five, and Welcome to the Monkey House were all given to me a few years ago by an ex-boyfriend who needed to get rid of most of his stuff. I'm so glad he did, because if he hadn't I might have never found out I loved Vonnegut. After devouring those, I went out and got Cat's Cradle for myself, then Breakfast of Champions. I think Galapagos is up next.
I'm excited to actually have a living room now, because it means that my books can be out in a common area and people can see them and talk about them. You've inspired me to take an inventory of what's on my shelves that isn't mine.
Posted by: Lindsey Kuper at August 27, 2008 07:41 PM
Breakfast of Champions! That's one of the few Vonnegut books that I remember getting from the library and returning, so I don't have that one on my shelf. I actually read Galapagos in hard cover when I was in middle school, when my literary awareness was too unforged for me to really appreciate the book. I just remember thinking it was strange as I devoured it.
Posted by: Courtney at August 27, 2008 09:07 PM