Welcome to bookchat where you can talk about anything...books, plays, essays, and audio books. You don’t have to be reading a book to come in, sit down, and chat with us.
So here we all meet again, in the house that cfk built. What a year that was, just passed, eh? I know we’re all ready for a far better one now, and do believe we’ll get there, in a week or so. Even more in a few months, as we start putting Covid in the rearview. Then it’ll all be smooth sailing from there, because obviously everything else is peachy with the world and America these days.
Dear Reader, I hope you will write a Bookchat for Readers and Book Lovers, some Wednesday evening this year. Let’s all meet here, as many Wednesdays as we can make it this year. Let’s each try to write one Bookchat, and pour into it what we love in books, what makes us curious and excited, what we want to share with this group. If we can pour a little of each personality together, we will combine all of us into a continually surprising and delightful melting pot, to feed our imaginations for many moons to come. Say you’ll write a Bookchat, in a comment below or in a kosmail to me. If you’re not a Readers and Book Lovers contributor already, we can sign you up if you’ll write a Bookchat later this year.
It’s ten in the morning, here in California. I’m sitting at my kitchen table, sat against a window facing south. Outside, the sun pours a hazy glow over an unremarkable leafy street in West LA. Inside, my table holds Colombian coffee beans, a fine grinder, Demerara sugar, and a shambolic pile of papers and Christmas cards. Most of the surface is cleared, to enclose a blue ballpoint pen and a legal pad. Here is my desert arena, where I wrestle my daemon.
The blank page stares back at me. Its lone and level sands extend forever, scorched and empty of life. It shows no pity for my plight, no hint of where my story should go next. Mirages haunt the corners of my vision, but there is no single path ahead.
This should be easier. I’ve been here many times before, I’ve discovered dozens of oases in my day. Writing comes naturally to me, my mind is a chatterbox. I used to love writing diaries, all kinds of diaries, on any subject: they brought me pride and joy; I’d make new friends in the comments, and meet old ones again; and I’d always learn so much along the way.
But I don’t care to write diaries anymore — or, not just any diaries, only perfect ones. Yet, there are no perfect diaries. They are mythical beasts.
The first book diary I ever wrote, well that was another country. My grand embarking, my debut, the start of all my journeys among Readers and Book Lovers. Writing that diary changed me, it deepened me. It made me more than before, and brought me nearer to my true self.
The Himalayas of my Bookcase popped out of my mind unexpectedly, like Athena from Zeus’ forehead, almost fully formed. There is a rare and marvelous kind of essay, my favorite kind, where you’ve been pondering a topic for months or years, until gradually all your insights and opinions crystallize into a clear and structured story. As if you were a mountain for millennia, haphazardly gathering seams of coal, until one day you looked inside yourself and found a diamond there instead.
[Ye Gods, how do Daily Kos’s tech wizards keep “improving” this platform, yet 90% of their work only makes it worse? I just linked to my Himalayas of my Bookcase essay. Then I noticed two paragraphs, separate in my original text, had smooshed together over the years. So I put the diary into Edit mode, inserted a paragraph break, and clicked Publish Changes. Now all of the paragraphs have melted together, and one of my favorite diaries is an illegible mess. Fuck Daily Kos, I’m with the Luddites. Bring back DK4! I’ll tidy up that illegible mess some rainy day, but for now I’ll just tell you the gist of it.]
The Himalayas of my Bookcase (in a nutshell)
Some books are easy to read, like taking a gentle hike through rolling hills. Let’s call these books Appalachians: books like The Old Man and the Sea, The Great Gatsby, To Kill a Mockingbird and Emma. What makes these books easy to read? Various ingredients that grab your attention without confusing or boring you, such as: a well-organized, compelling plot; characters who you care about; a vivid and interesting world; and a tasty writing style.
Beyond these we find slightly harder books, which we can call Alps. Books like All The King's Men, The Bell Jar, Madame Bovary, Their Eyes Were Watching God, and Tom Jones. These books can be harder to grasp because they have more layers and wrinkles; perhaps they were translated from another language, or written centuries ago, so their worlds or literary style are unfamiliar; they might be longer, with more details and characters to keep track of.
Finally I reach my destination, the Himalayas of my Bookcase, those books that are bought aspirationally, but often never fully read. The seriously hard, show-off books. Books like Proust's enormous opus, In Search of Lost Time, Joyce’s Finnegans Wake, Stein’s The Making of Americans, and also (among others listed in my original diary) The Magic Mountain, The Man Without Qualities, The Death of Virgil, The Recognitions, Dhalgren, Riddley Walker, The Book of the New Sun, The Tunnel and 2666. I’ve only read two of those, and only understood one. I did also try the first of Proust’s seven volumes (on my third attempt), and made it through thirty pages of Joyce’s thicket of scribbles.
Full disclosure, from my original diary:
I've been to the Himalayas outside my bookcase, if only for two weeks. I spent a week on a houseboat in Srinigar with my dad. Then I trekked up to a glacier at four kilometers altitude. I could tell you a thing or two, about a kind pony-man caught in the monsoon, his venal boss, and the blowback of over tipping; about the perils of potent hash at high altitudes; and about the most ambivalent experience of my life. But that would take a whole nother diary.
Writing The Himalayas of my Bookcase got me doing research, scouring the internet for lists of Difficult Books, and turning up some lovely or witty essays by writers who had trekked there before me. So I learned a lot, and was already feeling quite clever and pleased with myself. Then when I finished, I discovered two small sweet epiphanies.
The first epiphany was - well, back in those days I was getting high too much. So my usual habit, on completing my first draft, would be to spark up a bowl and drift off into a green haze of satisfaction. This time, I surprised myself. After hours of work, I was still riveted by my creative task. I went right back to the start of my diary, sober, and read it again to test its flow and root out typos. In a way, my work had become play, and I had found my calling. I didn’t need a buzz, I was already high on creating.
The second epiphany was that I’d gotten smarter, at least in my understanding of books. The Himalayas of my Bookcase was everything I might have told you, if I’d met you at a cocktail party the week before, and set out to explain my theory of reading novels. What I now realized was, that the work of laying it out and writing it all down, then hammering over it until the prose was smooth and polished, had turned my drunken rant into an eloquent lecture. It made more sense now, it had more structure and moving parts. My theory had evolved and clarified. Writing offered me a physical toolkit to test and shape my ideas into more complex stories. A fine novel can be a grand loom, to lay out subtle and interwoven truths, in a rich tapestry of life.
That’s the biggest difference between speaking from the tip of my tongue vs. writing and editing, over time, through second and third drafts. I’ve never yet written a book, but I can see how that requires the same process, times a thousand. A writer who loves their craft must process their theories (non-fiction) or plots (fiction) again and again, inspecting them from every angle to remove faults and impurities, to work out the entire spirit of the work. As Michelangelo put it, to free the David he saw in that block of marble. Writing is like alchemy or samurai sword making: an art and a science, requiring enormous patience and dedication. And in the end, the writer too grows clearer, and purer, better crafted and more self-aware. More of their whole conscious self.
Good thing we’re only writing diaries here, eh? No pressure. Though, kudos indeed to the Readers and Book Lovers here who have already written books, and damn fine ones at that. Powerful magicians dwell among us.
Dear Reader, I hope you will write a Bookchat for Readers and Book Lovers, some Wednesday evening this year. You don’t have to transmute yourself like I did, your diary need not be a peak experience and transcendent endeavor. What made my Himalayas diary special was simply that it came from the heart of my imagination, it grew from my deep enthusiasm and curiosity. It was already shining with meaning in my mind’s eye, before I considered putting a word of it in ink.
What magic element in books and reading does that for you, starts you dreaming and sets you free? When you write from there, your doubts and self-consciousness will fall away from you, and your enthusiasm will coin phrases you’ve never said before, you will reach for words you barely know (yet know they fit your flow), and you may search across the internet just to find a few more facts you need to complete the pattern of your imagining. What is most special to you about books and reading, what author or genre sets you alight? What is the bookchat you would like to read, but haven’t seen yet on Daily Kos? Please write that Bookchat for us this year, because that is the diary which will show us more of you and your personality. We welcome you here, and we want to know you better.
Let’s all meet here, as many Wednesdays as we can make it this year. Let’s each try to write one Bookchat, and pour into it what we love in books, what makes us curious and excited, what we want to share with this group. If we can pour a little of each personality together, we will combine all of us into a continually surprising and delightful melting pot, to feed our imaginations for many moons to come. Say you’ll write a Bookchat, in a comment below or in a kosmail to me. If you’re not a
Readers and Book Lovers contributor
already, we can sign you up if you’ll write a Bookchat later this year.
If you’re not already following this group, go to the link above, look under the flag at the top of the page, and click by the ♥, where it says Follow. Then you’ll get all our R&BLers diaries in your stream. As I write, we have 1999 followers, so you can go click now and become our 2000th follower.
To get back to where we once began, “Welcome to bookchat where you can talk about anything . . .”
I’m on a mission to get fifty different R&BLers to cook up a cornucopia of diverse Bookchats this year. Because I believe that R&BLers, and Daily Kos, and every one of us here today, we all need more of that. It is a worthy quest, and healthy teamwork.
But that’s just my personal opinion. You may be on another mission entirely, or no mission at all. In which case, it time for me to conclude, and for you to comment below about the books you’ve been reading, or how this crazy 2021 is treating you so far, or whatever else is wandering through your mind this evening . . .
