The Joy of Unexpected Books

I would like my children to read my collection of books, collected over the years,  but my guess is that they'll sell the lot and split the money.

From Front Porch Republic

By K.E. Colombini

Someday our children may read those shelves the way Ruth Swain read her father's—not as a catalog of books but as the story of a life, with all its detours and discoveries.

In his 2014 novel History of the Rain, Irish novelist Niall Williams takes on the voice of Ruth Swain as the narrator, a bedridden nineteen-year-old aspiring writer whose room is made homey with her late father’s collection of nearly four thousand books. Of these days, she writes early on, “I am going to read them all because that is where I am going to find him.” Toward the end of the book, she explains further:

The library that grew in our house contained all my father’s idiosyncrasies, contained the man he was at thirty-five, and at forty, at forty-five. He did not edit himself. He did not look back at the books of ten years ago and pluck out the ones whose taste was no longer his. So absorbed was he in the book he was reading that the library grew without his noticing.

The resonance of this reference struck me because I was introduced to Williams by a daughter of my own, who on the last Father’s Day gave me another of his novels, 2019’s This is Happiness, and as often happens with avid readers, one book leads to another once you have found a writer you like.

As one who can easily get stuck in my ways when it comes to reading, often revisiting the work of writers I like the most, new surprises like this can be an adventure, where I jump into a book having no idea what to expect, and I find myself stretching out more and more. The same happened with an earlier book she gave me, Leif Enger’s Peace Like a River.

Last year, a friend who knew of my appreciation for the work of Evelyn Waugh invited me to join him at his parish’s “Faith in Fiction” book club, where he needed to lead a session on Men at Arms and wanted a kindred spirit to help move the discussion along. Not knowing quite what to expect—and fully aware of all the stereotypes about suburban book clubs—I agreed. And then I kept coming back, as my schedule allowed, for discussions in subsequent months of Michael D. O’Brien’s apocalyptic Plague Journal and Mark Twain’s historical work Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc.

While I read Twain in high school and appreciated his work, I never had the desire to read this particular book. Yet, I was pleasantly surprised by the reverence he gave his subject. From the preface: “When we reflect that her century was the brutalest, the wickedest, the rottenest in history since the darkest ages, we are lost in wonder at the miracle of such a product from such a soil,” he wrote. “The contrast between her and her century is the contrast between day and night.” Twain certainly comes out as a far deeper man than his humor or satire would lead you to believe.

The book club continues this fall, and there will be several discoveries for me to make, of books I never would have set time aside for without the prompt. I was one of four members who attended a summertime meeting to plan the next season, and I was particularly humbled by a young man and woman who attended and offered clear expertise. They had a passion for literature, and the examples they brought up were mostly ones I was not familiar with. We whittled down a rather long list of a few dozen works to a final nine, for sessions starting in September. My contribution is an old personal and comfortable favorite; in December, I am leading a session on T.S. Eliot’s Murder in the Cathedral. As well as I know this work, I’m looking forward to new discoveries; on the list are works by Lucy Beckett, Mary Doria Russell, and Chaim Potok, none of whom I have read.

One benefit of this book club is that those who show up have actually read the work. Conversation rarely drifts into gossip—despite plenty of lighter moments—and we bring our best to the circle of folding chairs in the parish multipurpose room. The range of participants is diverse, from retirees to young adults, often evenly split between men and women.

While I came from a household where evenings were spent mostly watching television, this bookishness of mine traces back to my early years. I will never forget my third-grade teacher reading aloud from Elizabeth Enright’s The Four-Story Mistake and the drama that began when the Melendy children discovered a secret room in their new home. My childhood reading was predominantly formed by the adventures of Frank and Joe Hardy and by Mad magazine (for which I credit my sense of humor), and the first serious, adult novel I read as an early teen was Michael Crichton’s The Andromeda Strain, after watching the 1971 film adaptation on television. Crichton got me hooked long before he became famous for Jurassic Park.

My senior yearbook shows me sitting with a book on my lap beneath the caption, “Ken, who works in our school library, is often found reading some unusual book.” Even then, my reading life wandered wherever curiosity led.

My high school not only had a terrific literature program with teachers to match, but its tiny school library was a refuge where I first discovered the Great Books of the Western World set, not realizing it would lead me haphazardly to a Great Books college. There, for the next four years, reading became an extreme sport as we worked our way through the rigorous program, and yet somehow, I found time to discover a set of writers not on the curriculum, such as Waugh, G.K. Chesterton, and Samuel Johnson. I must confess there were times it was more tempting to sit down with these authors than with some of the required reading.

I occasionally feel like the eponymous character in John Edward Williams’s novel Stoner: “Sometimes, immersed in his books, there would come to him the awareness of all that he did not know, of all that he had not read; and the serenity for which he labored was shattered as he realized the little time he had in life to read so much, to learn what he had to know.”

Like the father in Niall Williams’s novel, I have amassed a book collection over the years, with about a thousand tracked now on a spreadsheet. Many of these books I have collected for later reading, and others are more aspirational —volumes I may never read but still like having nearby, like framed photos of family and friends. Someday our children may read those shelves the way Ruth Swain read her father’s—not as a catalog of books but as the story of a life, with all its detours and discoveries.