A customer came into Barnes & Noble today, Halloween. She looked awkward and bookish, a 20-something woman with dyed black hair in pig tails and barrettes like a six-year old girl, white knee high tube socks with red stripes at the top, and tape on her glasses. She came to the register and was practically vibrating with excitement about the brand new Danielle Steel book, her favorite author, and I thought she might cry when she found out she was 36 cents short of being able to purchase the second Steel title she was hoping to buy. As I interacted with her, checking out the masking tape wrapped around the bridge of her purple Buddy Holly glasses, totally in love with her because she was spending her last pennies on books, I honestly could not tell if she was in costume for Halloween, or if she was truly this great of a character. That’s what I love about bookish types. You never can tell.
Tag: literature
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Well, here it is, 6 am and I’m at my writing practice. I’m on my second cup of coffee and am nursing paper cuts from book jackets. I wonder who I’ll shelve today? I hope I get the fiction section. I feel like I’m among friends there.
I started a new book last night, The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society, which I had originally passed over because I thought it was a knock-off of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood, or the flying sweet potato pants or whatever that Ya-Ya like series was. But two adorable older women were in the book store the other day, obviously tight, spunky literary friends, and they asked for recommendations. I suggested Elegance of the Hedgehog, and they erupted into, “See, I told you!” and “Okay, okay, I guess I need to read it.” The one who had already read Elegance was now my best friend for life and told me that because of my fine taste in new reading, she couldn’t wait to see what I could give her. I started her off with Major Pettigrew’s Last Stand, The Weird Sisters, and A Reliable Wife, and she and her friend hunched over the synopses on the back cover, tracing words with their fingers like a mother does when she read to her child.
The two had come into the store to buy The Guernsey Literary Society book, and when I asked about it, they just gushed. It is absolutely not a Ya-Ya knockoff, and is in fact about a post-WWII literary society on a small island that had been occupied by Germany. The society was born of a secret pig roast (the islanders were not allowed to keep pigs – the Germans commandeered all the swine) and the lie of a book discussion a member told to German soldiers when they were caught out after curfew. There is a truth in the lie, though, in that apparently the members of this small island group do love literature and have lively discussions about it as they continue to meet. That’s as far as I’ve gotten so far, but I’ve already come across a line that delights me, and that I (and all my fellow booksellers) can absolutely I identify with:
“Booksellers really are a special breed. No one in their right mind would take up clerking in a bookstore for the salary… So, it has to be a love of readers and reading that makes them do it – along with first dibs on the new books.”
Yep, that pretty much sums it up. All my life I have flitted from one interest to another, taking up hobbies or studies then casting them aside – ecology (my degree), quilting, knitting, soapmaking. Nothing ever seems to stick. Except literature. My earliest memories are of reading books, laying on my bed with my feet on the wall. I remember palm trees scraping my windows at night when I read Salem’s Lot, and how that screeching on the glass terrified me. I remember reading and re-reading The Secret Garden, and how Shel Silverstein was my go-to when I didn’t have a novel to read. My earliest desire was to one day have a house with a bay window with a bench so that I could sit in the window and read. That hasn’t happened, but I’ve still got a lot of life, and a lot of reading left in me. Maybe it will yet.
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I was working the register at Barnes & Noble here in Christiansburg, Virginia the other day, and since it was dead, and since gift card season is about to begin, I browsed all the fancy card designs to pull samples to show customers. There are new ones out with snowmen, and winter scenes, as well as ones with the Cat in the Hat or a wild thing from Where the Wild Things Are.
The ones that inspired this post, though, are the $25, $50, and $100 cards. Each features a portrait of an author, like our currency has pictures of the presidents. So of course, I was curious. Who’s on what? Of all the authors in history, who are the only three who made the cut? As you can probably guess, Shakespeare is one of them. He’s on the $25 card. Makes sense – he’s one of the most prolific, and probably most consumed authors of all time (besides Stephen King). So he gets the most commonly gifted card. Dickens, whose work I cannot get through (sorry Greg, if you’re reading), is on the $50. I can’t speak on Dickens since I haven’t read him, but I’m sure Dickens fans are glad he’s there.
And on the $100? It makes me giddy just to think of it. On the hundred dollar gift card, the big daddy gift card, the largest denomination Barnes & Noble sells, is someone who is now near and dear to my heart, in a weird love-hate kind of way. I would have never recognized his face – I had no idea what he looked like – but when I read his name my heart leaped. Because though I do not know his face, I do know him. The author on the granddaddy of all Barnes & Noble gift cards, the BIG one, the gift of $100 worth of stories, of characters and place, of mind-expansion and adventure, is Mr. Herman Melville. Author of one Moby Dick. Which I read this summer. And am still basking in the afterglow of finishing it.
There are reminders of this glory everywhere. I just went to Thesaurus.com to find a synonym for “masochistic” and there’s a big banner there that says “Take the Moby Dick challenge. This difficult novel can scare off readers in just a few lines. See how far you can get.” Yeah? Well I got through the whole thing. BAM!
I shelved a copy at the book store the other day, and I smiled as I shelved it, thinking, “I read that.” Then mentioned to anyone who would listen – “Hey, guess what I did this summer? I read Moby Dick!” And of course, everyone has a story about Moby Dick. My coworker, for example, told me his dad has recently become obsessed with Moby Dick. So much so that he made the family go to the whaling museum in New England last time they visited relatives. My coworker rolled his eyes as he told me this.
I notice nods to Moby Dick in seafaring movies, recognize characters’ names in commercial products, or discover a line from the epic tale, and I get them now. I think, “Hey, that’s from Moby Dick.” There are references to Melville’s behemoth everywhere, and each time I recognize one, I get that same giddy feeling – I’m part of the Moby Dick club! (Jealous, aren’t you?) For all my life, I have that. I have read Moby Dick. And that my friends, is durable happiness.
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It took me ten years and two tries, but I’ve finally done it. I have finally read Moby Dick. I don’t know why this was the one classic that I felt I could not miss, despite trying once and giving up after about 200 pages. Maybe it’s because I grew up on the Atlantic coast and as my mom says, “have salt water in my veins.” Or because I read Ahab’s Wife for book club and was intrigued enough to give the real deal a try. Or maybe it was the “Why Read Moby-Dick?” story I heard on NPR, or the quiet, impassioned discussion going on next to me at happy hour between two of my Barnes & Noble co-workers, one of whom was reading Moby Dick for the first time, the other who had written her honors thesis about it.
For whatever reason, I got a bee in my bonnet to read Moby Dick this summer. To decisively engage. To commit. And I have done it. Now, sipping a stiff drink in satisfaction and celebration, I feel like I’ve run a marathon. An eight week marathon of the mind – of dedication and of a stubborn commitment to a ridiculous endeavor. “Call me Ishmael” was a bang that made me jump, grinning, from the starting line. For 150 pages I was in it, and I was loving it. And then, as in any endurance race, the adrenaline and endorphins wore off as the start fell away behind me, and I realized how far away the finish was, and how maddeningly dull all that middle part was. For the next 350 pages, I suffered. I suffered through chapters on whale anatomy. I read five minutes each night before boring myself to sleep. I wondered, “Why I am doing this? I could be reading something engaging. Something easy or fun. Something not painful.” And I’d turn my light off and go to sleep.
But as I told my girlfriend, I was not going to pick up another book. I was not going to give up again. So I read magazines. Cleaned the house. Tried new cocktails. And read for five minutes at night before my eyes would go blurry with disinterest.
After 6 weeks of this, at about page 500, I hit the wall. For one thing, I never count pages. Counting pages is like looking at the clock at work. If you’re constantly counting pages, you’re reading the wrong book. So the fact that I was counting down the pages til I was done with this damn book was a major indicator that I was wasting precious hours of my life. I was skimming, for God’s sake. And I came really, really close to giving it up.
But out of stubbornness and spite, I pushed through. And about page 600, it started paying off. Moby Dick started getting good. Like, really good. After literally hundreds of pages of drudgery, of seemingly unnecessary tangents, of so much talk of the White Whale, and of Ahab’s madness, that I began to wonder if Moby Dick were even real, and if I were mad for my stupid single-mindedness for finishing this book, on page 692, I read this line:
There she blows! there she blows! A hump like a snow-hill! It is Moby Dick!
And I was covered in goose-bumps. Just writing that line gives me goose-bumps all over again. That line is part of the American collective consciousness. It is so well-known that everyone, and I mean everyone, recognizes it. And I was there. I earned that prize. Once I got there, I knew all of my hard work was worth it. I don’t know why, but getting there made me feel like I had accomplished something big. Along with Ahab, I was mad to finally find Moby Dick, and the search was finally over. All that hard work, all that suffering, all of that pursuit – it finally paid off. It’s Moby Dick! He is real! And he has finally made his magnificent appearance.
Maybe that’s why that line is so beloved – because everyone feels the same way when they get there. You are overcome with relief, this sense of “FINALLY! We’re at the point of it all!” And whether by accident or genius, Melville wove this masterpiece in such a way that by the time you get to that famed line, the story has become – dare I say it? – a page turner. After such an investment – those torturous filler chapters so seemingly pointless, the chasing of this elusive whale so maddening – I just could not put it down. I almost missed the kids’ bus because I couldn’t stop reading.
And when I turned the final page, and realized, “I have done it! I have read Moby Dick!” I was able to cross off a major “to-do” on my bucket list. I felt a peace in my soul. Ironically (or maybe not so ironically) the same peace Ahab might have felt when after losing a limb (and his mind) to Moby Dick, after a mad, pointless, hubris-filled chase of the white whale, he could die knowing he had finally faced his leviathan.
