Thursday, August 25, 2011

A Portrait In Books

Ask anybody – I do not normally have an addictive personality. That is, I didn’t until a bookseller friend turned me on to goodreads.com. It started innocuously with one of those notes like you get on facebook asking to be friends. But this one’s header posed the tantalizing question, “Tess, how many of my books have you read?” I figured I’d have a look, just like I'd  had a look the day before at Linked-In when a customer wanted to be in my network. There was just one little problem with that though. It wasn’t possible for him to be in my network for the simple reason that I didn’t HAVE a network. But far be it from me to exclude him from my empty network since he clearly wanted to there, so I signed up with Linked-In so he could feel like one of the gang of nobody. It’s been almost three days now and I’ve never touched Linked-In except to add the five other people who also wanted to be included. Oddly, they are all men. Do women not like Linked-In?

Anyway this is not about linked-in– it’s about goodreads. In order to see if I had read any of Paul’s books I had to -- yep, you got it, I had to sign up – so I did, though I refrained from importing followers from facebook. This was Wednesday night and at that point Paul had listed slightly over 100 books that he’d read. I perused them only to find that I had read exactly five – A Gentle Madness and Patience and Fortitude, both by Basbanes; plus Catcher In the Rye and To Kill A Mockingbird. Not much commonality there -- but wait a second! – he’d read something called Round Ireland In Low Gear. That perked up my curiousity, so I clicked on it and up popped a complete description, plus links to buy it, reader’s recommendations, hand-picked lists it had appeared on, Paul’s opinion of it, AND – the coup de gras – a chance to save it on my “to be read list.”

I glanced at the clock and saw that it was now pushing midnight, but figured it wouldn’t hurt to add a few books and get my own list going. An hour later I had added forty titles that I’d already read, plus one that I was reading, and yet I still had to drag myself away from the computer. At first the titles came so fast I could hardly get them down before another dozen pelted me. But then, oddly, I hit a brick wall, which amazed me seeing as how I must have read thousands of books over the years. So I went to bed, got up at five and, believe it or not, headed straight to goodreads like a woman on a mission. Overnight still more titles had percolated and were by then brimming in my brain. So even before I went downstairs to make the Folger’s –it's a rare, rare thing that supercedes that holy ritual – I added the new stuff. And then I sat thinking for a few minutes and added maybe five more.

From then on, it became an all-day task. Yes, I worked. I always work. But I jumped over to goodreads every time a new author or title came to me. Shortly into it though my thinking switched gears and I began concentrating on categories rather than authors. Literary fiction, biographies, books about books, books about literature, art, books about writing … By evening I’d racked up over 100 books and ended up perusing the lists created by Paul’s eleven friends which gave me a couple more ideas to add to my own. I also saw that Paul had since added another sixty, so I had a look at those too, only to find that we were still stuck at the original five in common.

At this writing my list includes 155 books, one of which I’m currently reading and ten I want to read, most of which I didn’t know existed until I found goodreads. For me this site is not as much about the social network as it is about keeping track of what I’ve read and discovering books I would otherwise miss. Truly, it’s worth doing for those reasons alone, if for nothing else. But there’s also something so poignant about seeing all your favorites lined up with pictures of their covers. At first glance I wasn’t sure why this should be, but as I scrolled down the list memories flooded me as fast as the titles had earlier. There was my first year of marriage in my Hemingway/Fitzgerald/expatriate writers phase. And there were my favorite authors – Wally Lamb, Robert Halenga, Richard Russo, Anne Tyler … And there my beloved books about books – SunwiseTurn, Time Was Soft There, The King’s English

And my books about collage. And The Artist’s Way and the memory of how much fun I had taking the Artist's Way course in Medina with my friend Liz Nelson at the bead store that used to be in the pink Victorian house on Broadway. And walks with Nancy while we plumbed the depths of Gary Zukav’s The Seat of the Soul and Wayne Dyer’s The Power of Intention.

I must confess though. .At first I wasn’t going to list my less than literary or serious favorites, but in the end I did. And there they are – Elin Hilderbrand’s Nantucket novels and Mary Kay Andrews’ hilarious southern cozies, my favorites of which are Savannah Blues and Blue Christmas. There are other guilty pleasures too and I’ll be adding them as I go along.

As it turns out, the list in all its many hues is more than just a list,  which is why it was important to include the embarrassing as well as the exalted. In the end every book adds color, depth,and  even gaps in the symmetry of the picture. But in the end  they all come together to paint a portrait of me -- in books.

2 comments:

Cheryl said...

The Master Butcher's Singing Club! I love this book and when I mention the title to anyone they look at me like I mist be insane. Richard Russo is also an author I like. I've got to get on there and see all your titles.

tess said...

I thought of you first when I was writing this. I knew you would like it. It's really fun to see what people read and get ideas for stuff you want to read. Ii's kind of like the worl's biggest book club. Actually, they even HAVE online bookclubs on there broken down by readings interests. Yes, check out my list and then build your own.