A Reader's Reader

Day 295 of the "What are you reading, and why?' and today I met Ben, a reader's reader, and he has a big stack of books he'll now be reading, and he reads because he was born to read, raised to read, because he's a reader's reader, the way James Bond is a man's man.

Yes, Bond.  James Bond.

"Ben.  Born Ben."

Ben did not actually say that.  What he actually said, in response to my question, "Are you doing some kind of reading project?" was, "My life."  And I completely understood!

Ben was at that point, after quietly moving through the aisles of Babbitt's Books, making a fine stack of books on a convenient computer stand.  He had hung his coat on the back a chair, and every now and then he asked a question. One was about Graham Greene.  Our Man in Havana, I said.  He said, The End of the Affair. But we didn't have either of these. Or, evidently, The Quiet American.  So Ben's stack includes others, instead.

Here is Ben's stack of books:

Graham Greene:*  The Power and the Glory, The Heart of the Matter, A Burnt-Out Case 
Arthur Rimbaud: A Season in Hell and The Drunken Boat (in one volume, paperback)
Richard Adams: Watership Down (which Ben read as a child, but needed now to own again)
Ken Kesey: One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest
Sinclair Lewis: Main Street
Neal Cassady: The First Third 

Ben said it was time to read a book by Neal Cassady, as Neal had been the hero of about 4 books he'd read. Ben's favorite writer is Jack Kerouac, and he made a Kerouac pilgrimage to San Francisco and found Kerouac's house on North Beach, a A-frame that "didn't fit," so it must have been his.

He read Catcher in the Rye at about age 12, and also The World According to Garp, by John Irving, at the urging of his mother.  My parents recommended Garp to me, too! And I recommended Franny and Zooey to Ben! And also White Teeth by Zadie Smith, which he bought, because we had a nice hardback for $4!

I didn't mean to put Ben on the spot by asking if he'd read any women. I was responding to his comment that he liked mainly the older stuff and the only contemporary writer he really liked was David Foster Wallace.* I recommended Zadie Smith as a contemporary writer who puts people together of different cultures and generations, the way Flannery O'Connor would stick people of different beliefs and attitudes into a paper bag and shake them up to see what would happen. Ben liked that, and also Salman Rushdie's blurb on the back.

*Wikipedia tells me Graham Greene had bipolar disorder. Ah. Erm, David Foster Wallace.

Ben is writing a novel himself!  And that's all I'm going to say about it.

Ben remembered that the first book he ever bought at Babbitt's, at the old location, was Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse Five, when he was 15. It hooked him, on Vonnegut, and on Babbitt's, and on used bookstores in general, because new bookstores, he says, have plenty of cookbooks and mysteries, but not this great stuff.

"Why Rimbaud?" I asked. Because Kerouac mentioned him. Lots of Ben's reading is of the one-book-leads-to-another sort, and, if you read my blog, you know the same thing happens to me. Why Main Street? Because we didn't have Babbitt, mentioned in the Nobel Prize citation, or Arrowsmith, which won the Pulitzer Prize.

Ben asked us if Babbitt's Books is named for Babbitt. Yes, it was once a favorite book of the owner.  And there is a giant flat-Brian picture of the owner in the window holding Babbitt, one of those wonderful library Read posters. Sometimes it scares the baristas at the Coffeehouse across the street, because it looks like he is watching them. Telling them to read this book....

And I asked Ben if he knew the Pulitzer bloggers. He did not, but I told him they are in my blogroll, and they are here and here, too, Ben, if you are reading. Or if your mom is reading!

Hocus Pocus & the Lockward Chocolate

Day 190...and two random strangers are reading Hocus Pocus by Kurt Vonnegut, because

1) her sister loved Cat's Cradle

2) he loved Slaughterhouse 5

Another random stranger is reading Slaughterhouse 5, because, amazingly, we had a copy at Babbitt's. The sister who loved Cat's Cradle still needs a copy of that because she loaned it to someone and never got it back. Which seems to happen often with Vonnegut.

Now you see it, now you don't!

I was fascinated, in my mini-pseudo-research on this topic (Wikipedia, Amazon.com) to learn that "hocus pocus" may derive from the ritual and Latin of the Eucharist, a sort of hoc est corpus corruption, or from a Norse sorcerer, Ochus Bochus (sounds good to me), or from the Welsh for "hoax," which is Hovea Pwca, the second part pronounced Pooka, from which we also get Shakespeare's Puck (a personal favorite), or, perhaps some combination of all these into random coincidii form!!! I love words, and word origins, even if they are far-fetched.

I know a bank where the wild thyme blows....

Vonnegut's Hocus Pocus is structurally interesting, being a nonlinear collage of fragments by main character Eugene Debs Hartke (college professor/prison inmate) "assembled" by Vonnegut into this piecemeal satire.

I love Vonnegut. I remember reading the short story collection titled God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater as a mere teen, beside my hometown pool. OK, I was weird. But surely other teens I knew loved Vonnegut, too!

My Diane Lockward "chocolate" for the day, from What Feeds Us, actually has a chocolate in it, with a date inside instead of a cherry or apricot. (Hocus pocus, an unanticipated fruit! But I'm so weird, I love dates!) Anyway, it is a lovely and funny prose poem about...ah! dating!...that contains the phrase "Yesterday a letter appeared in my mailbox..." which sort of freaks me out, as I am just now proofreading a prose poem that takes place in the foyer and involves a letter in my mailbox!

On the other hand, it is always nice to find a kindred spirit.

And, to further the random coincidii, a fellow came in the store today who is someone I hope someday to set up with my accidentally celibate friend...who shall remain nameless.

But first, both of them need to read The Sexy Book of Sexy Sex by Kristen Schaal and Rich Blomquist.

Never Say Cicada

Day 182 of the "What are you reading, and why?" project, and Patrick is going to be reading a lot of books, because he wanted to use his credit card and he'd come in for Walden ($3) and Daniel Quinn (which we didn't have), and we only take credit cards for $5 and up (because of the annoying charges) so I said, "Have you looked on the Select New Arrivals shelf?"

He found great stuff. Because he had wanted Quinn, I pointed out Life of Pi, by Yann Martel, for its amazing blend of philosophy and circumstances, as reported to me by Gary, Tony, and other happy readers. It is in a yet-to-read stack here in my house.

I asked if he'd read Fahrenheit 451, by Ray Bradbury, because there it was, a classic we have trouble hanging onto, and, sure enough, he hadn't. He had read two Vonnegut books he liked a lot--Slaughterhouse Five and Cat's Cradle--so when he saw Jailbirds and Breakfast of Champions, he snapped those up, too!

When I asked why he wanted to read Thoreau's Walden, he said he'd seen the film Into the Wild, and wanted to see why someone would want to go into the wild. In the book by Jon Krakauer about Chris McCandless, we learn that Chris was reading Thoreau before he went on his own discovery of wilderness and self.

Odd, how a little technology hassle should lead to an armful of books. Don't worry, no one forced him. He chose them all himself and had time to change his mind. Boss was on the phone, so I couldn't use the credit card machine till he got off. (Hmm, unfortunate phrasing, perhaps.) Anyhoo, that technology glitch gave Patrick time to think it over, and he wanted the whole stack.

And now for the cicada. Billy Collins famously announced in his introduction to The Best American Poetry 2006 that he couldn't make it past the word "cicada" in a poem, even though his poem "The Student" in The Trouble with Poetry (Random House, 2005) of course has the word "cicada" in it. I always see the fondness, subtlety, and depth in Collins, as well as the humor, and actually enjoyed his snippiness in Ballistics. He has a right to be snippy; people are always sniping at him. But, as I am writing prose at the moment, I have no fear of cicadas, alive, in language, or as empty shells.

Last night, just before we surrendered to air conditioning, I was enjoying the bit of breeze coming in my window from an area with an evergreen bush and a flower bed that provide a little privacy screen in my cool, sunken office space. Suddenly something crashed against the glass window above the screen. A bat? A transformer moth? A persistent possum? No, of course it was a cicada! A Dog Day Cicada, here in the dog days of August.