I took a trip to the bookstore yesterday. It’s half a block away. I should go there more often, but, like most Vermillion stores, I feel as though I’m intruding whenever I step foot inside. To be fair, the local bookstore downtown is really quite nice. It’s small and has an interesting collection. I always find something worth reading, and their prices are good. If you live in Vermillion and you haven’t been to Lied, I recommend checking it out.
I, personally, like the idea of buying a used book. There is the thrift-is-hip quality, which is ok, but more importantly for me there is a strange draw to the idea that someone once thought this book looked interesting enough to read, and for me to read it is to build some sort of strange connection with the previous owner by which we share an experience that transcends space and time, and can only find meaning in human experience. Anyways, what took me to the bookstore today was something specific. I am working on writing a creative piece for my Honors Thesis. My abstract states that the purpose of my project to “present the colorful interior of my mind through fiction”. The issue is that while the interior of my mind may be colorful, as everyone’s is, I am not sure in which way the colors are mixed, or, in fact, which colors are dominate enough to warrant expression. So, I am on a mission. My mission is to read something new, in order to both add to the collection in my mind as well as activate ideas I long ago printed upon my memory. Daily, I received new recommendations. I really do need to carry around a notebook and compile a list of recommendations, a list that I can work through one by one as I slowly become the walking library that I dream of. But even without the endless paper list, I have a short list. On the top of the short list is the following:
Borges
I have already read quite a lot of Jorge Luis Borges, but as long as there is at least one story, one poem or one lecture that I have not read, he will remain at the top of the short list. And so I am currently looking for Borges’s Collected Fictions. It is unfortunate that because Borges only wrote short works, there are only collections and anthologies. This means that there is quite a bit of overlap from book to book. So when I find a new Borges book, while I read it from front to back, I am not ingesting, necessarily, new material (although differences in translation give plenty of reason to reread material when it comes to Borges). That said, Collected Fictions is the ultimate collection, containing the majority of his works compared to other collections. There are more works in Collected Fictions that I have not read compared to any others, which is why it is on the top of the list of “Borges Books that I NEED”. Unfortunately, the bookstore did not have any new Borges collections. Since I bought their copies of Labyrinths and Ficciones ages ago, they have only added a strange anthology by a translator I had never seen before. After paging through it for a good fifteen minutes, I decided it wouldn’t add much to my own library. I would save myself for Collected Fictions. I moved on to the next name:
Gabriel Garcia Marquez
Marquez is always recommended to me when someone finds out that I love Borges. I am embarrassed that I have not yet read anything from Marquez. So, I decided that today was the day that I would change that. The bookstore had a couple of different books to choose from, although the one I had hope for, One Hundred Years of Solitude, was not one of them. I’m not sure why I ended up choosing Love in the Time of Cholera, but I hope it was fate, and I also hope it changes my life forever. Perhaps I should hope my expectations aren’t set to high.
The reason that I made my other selection, John Barth’s Chimera, is a bit more interesting. As I mentioned earlier, the connection between the former owner and the new owner is meaningful to me. For this reason, I love books with marks in them. It’s a glimpse into the mind that read the book before me. It’s a message from a mind absorbed in the content, which often times creates a completely new story. When I opened up this version of Chimera, I knew I had to buy it. Here is the title page. I knew at this moment that the rest of book had to be a work of art, not by Barth (although I had high hopes for that too), but by the previous owner.
People who take notes like this, in the first place, are usually interesting characters. But check out the table of contents…
“…no fucking plot (or plot dependent entirely on a disjointed artificial device, like looking through a picture album”
Wonderful.
But the best was yet to come. I paged through the first chapter, exploring the mind of the previous owner. Circles isolated words and arrows referenced random thoughts found in the margin, and on page 15 I found it. The previous owner had so much to say and said it with such force.
Just bubble heads doing tricks. I love it. Unfortunately, like most readers, the previous owner’s comments trail off after the first chapter. There are a couple notes here and there, but by the end of the book there is only John Barth.
Thank you, previous owner, for the messages you left in Chimera. I hope you finished it.
