A newspaper article reminded me just in time, before 2018 closes, that this is the 25th anniversary year of one of my five favourite novels, A Suitable Boy by Vikram Seth. There was a long stretch of time when I’d read this door-stopper of a book, weighing in at roughly 1,500 pages, every single year (one year even twice). I could not locate my copy, so last week I bought a shiny (it was wrapped in cellophane!) new copy. But as I read through, humming aloud the lines I recalled by heart, it didn’t feel like the same novel. It was as if I was reading it through a tracing paper, at a disorienting remove. I missed my old copy, with all the notes in the margins added in each rereading, and in doing so — in not being able to connect to a beloved text in an unfamiliar edition — I felt very superficial. As if I had failed to read a text on its own terms, without my old scribbling to reconnect us. I have always felt a bit guilty about writing in books. But was Seth’s narrative now lost to me forever?
Notes, folds and scribbles
To recover my bearings, I went back to another well-loved book, Ex Libris: Confessions of a Common Reader, by the American essayist, Anne Fadiman. And it worked. Books about books/ reading is a burgeoning shelf, but Fadiman’s slim collection, at 132 pages, is surely the stand-out volume among them, containing pointers and prompts to map an entire universe. In the essay “Never Do That to a Book”, she talks about the many ways in which readers make a copy their own, ways which in another’s perspective could amount to “book abuse”. The title draws from a Fadiman family holiday when her brother left the book he was reading face down in his hotel room, to return to find it closed and with a note from a member of the staff on top, all in capital letters: “Sir, you must never do that to a book.” For her brother, it was a staggering experience, as if someone had implied that he did not truly love books.
Fadiman divides readers into two categories: those who believe in “courtly love” and those who subscribe to “carnal love”. The hotel staff was exhibiting courtly love; the Fadimans believed in carnal love. She writes: “To us, a book’s words were holy, but the paper, cloth, cardboard, glue, thread, and ink that contained them were a mere vessel.” For instance, she says, her father, the editor-writer Clifton Fadiman, would tear off and throw away pages of novels he read on airplanes to reduce the weight of the paperback.
She herself confesses to dog-earing, with a system in place, the upper corner folded in to mark her page and the bottom corner turned in to mark pages to be photocopied. This confession stuns me every time I read it. I am all for reading books as one likes, or how else would I justify my liberal underlining, sticky notes, and notes and asides in ink. But dog-earing! I don’t even use that facility on my e-reader. There has to be sub-category of dog-earers.
But it’s the last essay, “Secondhand Prose”, in Ex Libris that offers a solution. Fadiman recounts a 42nd birthday excursion to a secondhand bookshop, and returning with 19 pounds of book. By any measure, that’s excessive, but it is a reminder of the urge to buy books by the armfuls in a secondhand store, something that never happens when faced with brand-new editions. Explaining her love of secondhand books, Fadiman writes: “I... began to enjoy the sensation of being a small link in a long chain of book owners. The immaculate first editions cherished by rare book collectors — no notes, no signatures, no bookplates — now leave me cold. I have come to view margins as a literary commons with grazing room for everyone — the more, the merrier.”
It’s a clue that I need to look for a used copy of A Suitable Boy, one with the margins filled in. And my lost copy? I hope it will give the finder the “sensation” of being part of a longer, connected readership of the book.
A changing ‘odd shelf’
Fadiman also has an essay called “My Odd Shelf”, talking about the collections of books (own or borrowed) that many readers keep apart: “On this shelf rests a small, mysterious corpus of volumes whose subject matter is completely unrelated to the rest of the library, yet which, upon closer inspection, reveals a good deal about its owner.” My “odd shelf” keeps changing character, and I shudder to think what this reveals about me. But upon discovering that Ex Libris was published 20 years ago, I am now pulling together old favourites that have publishing anniversaries this year.