This is a reading of the main essay from today’s letter. Not included in the audio: the poem and the fiction (but they are here in the notes). You should subscribe to the email version at luckywords.substack.com On Books Kate and I had our anniversary this week, and we went book shopping. Besides perhaps the grocery store and church, bookstores are where we’ve spent our marriage, so it feels appropriate that we spent part of our day spending money on books. It was a used bookstore, in part because we like the selection and in part because we like the prices. The book I bought was $7, but there was a 40% off sale going on, so I got it for less than the cost of a gallon of gas at the pump. At freeway speeds, my car gets about 3 gallons per hour, so the math works out very much in favor of the book: will I get 20 minutes of value from the book? The answer to that is almost always yes. Thrift stores are an even better value of course, since most books come in at a half gallon or less, but the selection is hit or miss, and there’s no organization. Plus it feels strange to plop down on a couch with a pile of books at a thrift store. Someone might want to buy that couch. And of course that couch will have that suspicious basement smell, and the couches at our local used bookstore feel very hygienic. The book I bought was an old collection from Garrison Keillor called We Are Still Married and even if I hadn’t actually wanted it, it was our anniversary so I couldn’t not buy it. The intro, the only part I’ve read so far, is from another age. It talks about Ronald Reagan as a contemporary figure and pokes fun at Dan Quayle. There’s a big part of me that feels like 1990 wasn’t all that long ago, which I know makes me feel like an out-of-touch old man. I may be out of touch, but I really don’t feel all that old. On the other hand it was our 33rd wedding anniversary, so I’m not that young either. I feel like just the right age. Just the right balance of young and old: understanding but not indulging in the excesses of youth, grazing but not wallowing in the wisdom of age. Which would sound awfully prideful if it weren’t manifestly true that I’m obviously not enjoying abundant wisdom nor experiencing abundant energy. Dumb and lazy, that’s my style. Perfect balance; just the right age. Garrison Keillor was 47 when the book came out, and he talks as if 47 made him a grizzled veteran of life. I look back at 47 with some nostalgia. Keillor is now in his 80s, and I can only guess about what the thinks about his 47-year-old self. The book is paperback, originally $8.95—which is less than two gallons of gas at my local pump today—and has that wonderful soft paper that Penguin uses in its paperbacks. It’s pleasant to flip the pages and feel them feather across my thumb, the whisper of pages that sounds like sitting next to a person sleeping on the couch, book in lap. The pages are not white, not like my notebook or the glowing screen of your phone, but a softer color: paper that is admitting it used to be wood. This book is a humane object not a consumer product, because I won’t consume it. I’ll read it, but the book will persist, happy to be read and then ready, undiminished, for the next reader after me. Plus if I’m lucky I can take it back to the used bookstore and they’ll give me a buck for it, and they’ll mark it up again and sell it again. The real capitalist move is to sell the same object three, four, five times. Who am I kidding? I won’t sell this book back. If I weren’t going to keep the book I would have borrowed it from the library. For zero dollars I could have read the book and for zero dollars someone else would read it after me. Meanwhile library employees do their work for free, apparently. If I only wanted to rent the book I’d borrow it, otherwise if it comes from the bookstore it is staying with me for the long haul. Kate keeps threatening me that when we run out of bookshelves, we will need to weed out our books. But we can always fit another bookshelf in the house, and I could always double-stack the books on the shelves that we’ve got. Sure, double stacking makes it difficult to find the book you’re looking for, but it’s excellent for dust collection, and besides who is the boss around here anyway? I am of course joking about never removing any books from our collection. Over the years, I have given plenty of books to the thrift store or taken them to the used bookstore. Numerous books. Surely over the years I have pruned literally tens of books from our shelves. Our dear friend Ellen says, “There’s always room on the friend bus.” And since a good book is a true friend, there’s always room for more books. Young people today meet potential partners via apps: swipe left, swipe right, DM, DM, swipe right, swipe left. It’s not unlike book shopping, really. I absolutely first judge a book by the cover. The cover causes me to pause, the pause gives me a chance to pick it up, picking it up encourages me to read the blurbs on the back cover, which leads to looking at the author photo, and finally I’ll start reading a couple of pages somewhere in the middle to get a flavor for the prose. How long before I feel hooked? Most of the time I put the book back on the shelf for someone else. Swipe left, swipe right. When I make the commitment to buy a book—and it is a commitment to join my shelves for perhaps the rest of my mortal life—I will bring the book home and that night read for ten minutes, maybe half an hour. And then maybe it will go onto my shelf, never to be touched again. A book is a friend, not a member of the family. The difference between friend books and human friends is that friend books won’t load themselves onto the truck when it comes time to move. To be fair, human friends aren’t loading themselves either, but the good ones are loading something and can talk while we work together. Books are prima donnas in that regard: when they get my attention they want all of it. No, don’t clean the kitchen, don’t get dressed, don’t talk with anyone else, don’t drive to the store. But also no “where have you been?” when I return from a multi-year hiatus. On this standard, how does my iPhone match up? Same push for all my attention with an added burden of neediness. The phone begs for my attention. It tugs at my sleeve. It punches me in the leg. It pulls the fire alarm. It is jealous of everything else. But! the iPhone collects no dust and doesn’t need an entire truck when I move. So it’s a mixed bag. Then again, a used book costs me a gallon of gas, 20 minutes of driving. That’s a trip to Costco and back. The cost of my phone is a drive from Boston to Los Angeles. Then to Denver. Then Dallas. Then Atlanta. Wow I hate my phone right now. And yes of course I’ve got books on my phone. I have dozens. No, I just checked: hundreds. My Kindle app has more than 500, and there are more than a hundred more in Apple Books, and also Serial Reader, Readwise Reader, Libby, Hoopla, not to mention audiobooks which I’m skipping over for now. So my phone can be a vehicle for reading books, but never with as much pleasure as the paper-ink-glue variety. As an object, my phone has as much attraction for me as someone else’s toothbrush. The addictive aspect of the phone is all software. What draws me to the book as an object is how sensuous it is: earthy, warm, soft. On the floor next to me I’ve got 13 books. On the bookshelf at my shoulder are another hundred or so. I’ll say about 300 in the room, and a couple few thousand in the house. Plenty of room for growth. There’s always room on the friend bus. Least Bad Poem The poem’s title is still doubly a work in progress, but I didn’t want to just have another “untitled” poem, and the first line is clearly not the way to go in this case. “Rumbling” Dozing off in my chair Like an old man, Book spread across his (my) belly, Gentle snore thrumming in my (his) chest, I do not know how long The lovers have paused their tiff But my languor has colored their quarrel Into pleasant warm hues And maybe they will reconcile Into a new happy, cozy love, Or maybe they will split forever And find their peace Only hazily remembering Where they once argued In a comfortable chair Under a warm sunny window To the content, rumbling breathing Of an old man reading. The Least Bad Poems that I share aren’t always quite so closely linked with the subject of the essay, but today it seemed too tidy to pass up. Plus, I love the tiny echo to Keats’s “Ode on a Grecian Urn” with its interrupted lovers. This poem also speaks to the involvement that readers play in the process of transforming written words into a story: the reader’s background, current condition, and prior reading will change how we interpret a text. In this case, the pleasant nap alters the timbre of the events in the story, even though it can’t change the events themselves. I’m certain that there are some books that I liked a lot more because of where I was reading it than if I had read it at another time or in another place, and conversely, there are some books that I might have enjoyed much more had I switched into a pleasanter locale. Some Fiction We least heard from these two a couple of weeks ago. Overheard: Heather and Ashley “He’s good, thanks. He says hi.” “So, hey: do you have anything left in your apartment, or has he liberated everything?” “Ha ha, very funny.” “Well?” “Well what?” “Is he still swiping your stuff?” “Just little stuff, nothing important. You wouldn’t even notice.” “It’s going to be so weird if you guys move in together. Suddenly you’ll have a full set of dishes again.” “It’s not…” “Have you said anything to him about it ever?” “No! No, of course not. I couldn’t.” “You want me to?” “Hell no! Honestly, Heather, in every
