Reading Note:
Conflict of Laws
9 March 2015
For months now, one of the little books on the counter at Crawford Doyle has been Marie Kondo’s The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up: The Japanese Art of Decluttering and Organizing. I’ve resisted — and resisted. But I caved last week and bought a copy. It was inevitable, I suppose. “Decluttering” is one of my big subjects, and I’m in no position to disdain professional advice. Especially when it’s so delicious. Kondo writes with an elfin briskness that all by itself suggests that getting rid of stuff not only ought to be easy but will be immensely gratifying. Her mantra: Don’t hold onto anything that doesn’t “spark joy.” Ergo:
My basic principle for sorting papers is to throw them all away. … After all, they will never inspire joy, no matter how carefully you keep them. (96)
She doesn’t — phew! — mean all papers. She concedes that there are papers that “must be kept indefinitely,” and she recommends setting all “sentimental” papers aside for later triage. (You’ll be throwing all of them away, too, but for different reasons.) But what a joyous idea! Certainly nothing floods me with pleasant relief more than bidding adieu to bags and bundles of paper.
With regard to books, Kondo is more perspicacious, even if her net-net advice is (as always) the same. She has some very good things to say about the possession of books, and I am meditating on them round the clock. One observation, however, stands out for immediate, explicit consideration. I reproduce it in its original boldface.
The moment you first encounter a particular book is the right time to read it. (95)
Although I can’t think of any titles at the moment, I know that I have encountered numerous exceptions to this rule. After years of sitting on a shelf, this book or that one has emerged not only as the one to be reading right now, but, more than that, as a book that I shouldn’t have properly understood had I read it when I bought it. Although I say “numerous,” however, such books don’t amount to a serious fraction of my library. On the whole, I agree with Kondo. Here is my corollary, which I assure you I’ve been struggling to obey for some time now:
Don’t buy a book that you’re not prepared to read, all the way through, right now.
But, stuff happens. I was bringing my reading pile down to size last week when boxes began arriving. Plus the equivalent of a box: a phone call from Crawford Doyle informing me that a copy of Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Buried Giant was being held for me. (In the process of liberating it, I purchased not only Tidying Up but the Coralie Bickford-Smith edition of Wuthering Heights, a novel that I haven’t read since the age of fifteen. Bickford-Smith had a lot to do with my good behavior during the reading of Great Expectations.) Jonathan Sperber’s Karl Marx: A Nineteenth-Century Life arrived — precisely the sort of book that, if not read at once, moulders away for years in the limbo of “unread” books. So I’ve read two chapters all ready. It’s excellent, and precisely the kind of biography that I want: the subtitle is deadly serious.
Nevertheless, I broke my rule when I ordered Sperber’s book. I was following a conflicting rule, one that was very deeply imprinted on my character by a suburban upbringing in the age of bomb shelters.
Stock up now, while you’re thinking about it.
As you can see, I no longer approve of this rule, which wreaks havoc in the kitchen as well in in the library. I knew at once, when I unpacked the life of Marx, that I should have to finish off Sven Beckert’s The Empire of Cotton double quick. Which I did, over the weekend. Cotton is an important book about capitalism — a very important book, I think — and it is reasonably well-written. But the plush profusion of facts and figures in support of Beckert’s assertions (about which I needed no persuading) clotted the narrative, making one feel rather stuck in traffic. (It occurs to me that such books would be vastly improved by moving all, or most, of those facts and figures to an appendix, perhaps in graphic or tabular format. I also found it interesting that Beckert ended his book without any apparent sense of leaving his story in the middle: the current configuration of the Empire of Cotton is hardly likely to continue indefinitely.)
There were two recent acquisitions, also purchased at Crawford Doyle, that had to be dealt with: the new (the last?) Tony Judt, and the latest Greg Baxter. I’ve already chewed off the first portion of Jennifer Homans’s collection of her late husband’s uncollected essays and book reviews, and I’m in no danger of not reading the rest: this is exactly what I long for between issues of the New York and London Reviews, and no wonder, since that’s where many of them were published. When the Facts Change is a great book to take to lunch.
Greg Baxter’s last book, The Apartment, arrived last summer — right before our Fire Island vacation and all the upheaval that followed. I liked it a lot, which made it one of the very few novels by a contemporary American male that I should recommend. The new novel, Munich Airport, is a longer, darker version of The Apartment, with fewer tangents. Once again, the account of a short period of present time is punctuated by extended flashbacks. The flashbacks run to a handful of earlier times, and are never complete. As they pile up, a picture emerges, and it is not, so far, a pretty picture. I have not quite finished Munich Airport, so I can’t say much more right now. Looking over the entry about The Apartment, however, revealed a big difference between the two novels. Of the first novel’s narrator, I wrote that “he was more interested in the world than in himself.” I shouldn’t say that of the second novel’s narrator, not because he is too interested in himself but because he is not interested enough. He hates himself too deeply to take an interest in the world. But enough of that now; I’ll have more to say when I finish the novel. And I shall finish the novel, very soon!
Marie Kondo all but recommends chucking her book when you’re done with it, but I don’t think that I’m ever going to be done with it, no matter how much stuff I get rid of. Cathy Hirano’s translation is too much fun to read.