Finally giving up on half my library (the shitty half)

Reflections occasioned by the Vietnamese epic, Song of Kieu

I buy way too many books. It’s a problem. The Kindle makes it a bigger one, because it puts no limit on the number of books I can own. I was a Kindle early adopter: I got one in 2009, and I’ve been buying books ever since. I own around three thousand Kindle books and maybe another thousand on Amazon. I got many of these books on sale. There was a time when I obsessively shopped the Kindle sales, buying whatever discounted books (usually they were priced at $2.99) seemed interesting. I’ve also bought a number of book bundles from Humble Bundle and Storybundle. Some of these bundles have been great: I really like the Noir bundle curated by Nick Mamatas for Storybundle. I read the incredible Victorian true-crime novel, Harriet, about a couple of miscreants who mistreat and murder a disabled woman. Very good book. I also got a few other great reads from that one. But most of the bundles are less fruitful.

Buying books is a day-dreaming activity. I imagine reading these books someday, thinking about having their knowledge. I have a very broad view of the kinds of knowledge I’d want—I always think, oh yeah, romance novels, oh yeah, self-published space operas, oh yeah, true crime novels, those are all things I want to know about. The classics are no exception. Oxford classics are wonderfully-priced: I’ve bought out most of their catalog. I also purchase whatever Penguin Classics catch my fancy. I’m like, well you can never go wrong with the classics.

Organizing my shelves is also an obsession. It’s just a cheaper and more time-consuming form of day-dreaming. When my books are organized, then I’ll be able to read them all! Earlier this year I scanned the barcodes of my physical library and put them into coded boxes so I’d know exactly where to find each book. Then I got tired of not having them to hand, so I unpacked the boxes and put them back on the shelves. I have a storage compartment at a local self-storage where I put all the books I can’t bear to give up but don’t think I’ll ever read (this is where I put all the copies of my own books that publishers send me).

My digital shelves are no exception. I got worried that someday Amazon would go tits up and I’d lose access to my books (this has already happened in China!) so over the summer I broke the DRM on my whole library and imported it into Calibre, an ebook management software. This also allowed me to use third-party e-readers that make managing large libraries easier.

Sometimes when I am looking for a book I will use the “find random title” function on my e-reader, but I’ve noticed that a lot of the titles it brings up are books I just have no desire to read: random self-help books that came in book boxes or popular novels that I must’ve gotten on discount. So now I am going through the 2300 book library on my device (itself a subset of the 4000 book library on my computer, which is itself a subset of the c. 6000 book library that encompasses my paper, audio, and ebook libraries). And it’s been really great to delete some of this garbage.

Like, no Adam Mitzner, your book The Perfect Marriage, while I am sure it’s fine, is not something I want to put in my brain right now!

I’m limiting the library now to books I’ve heard of and have an actual desire to read. Thus, a short story collection by sci-fi writer Jo Walton can stay, while OTORIMONOGATARI, a Japanese light novel by someone called Nisoisin, must, sadly, be removed. It’s so freeing! Deleting a book is like crossing something off my to-do list (to be precise, I am not deleting them entirely, merely deleting them from the active line-up on my devices, but in practice this means I’m unlikely to ever read them).

I was inspired to do this after I read Song of Kieu, a Penguin Classic I found when I randomly flipped to page 55 (out of 400) of my book collection. I knew that the Song of Kieu was a Vietnamese epic, but I didn’t really know the details. However I started reading it and was immediately hooked. The translation is utterly gorgeous. I’ve never seen a book translated like this. It’s translated into free verse, but very rhythmic free verse that frequently falls into iambic rhythms. It’s startling that the translator (a white guy who was a former aid worker in Vietnam) gave themselves such a free hand, and yet still produced something I’d expect from someone with the ear of a professional poet. For him this was a labor of love, completed on spec, with fellowship money, and he’s really done well by this book.

The tale is about Kieu, the daughter of a fallen family of civil servants, who sells herself as a concubine to recoup her father’s debts. Her erstwhile husband sells her to the madam of a brothel, and she has a number of tragic adventures and near misses. She is beautiful, of course, and her nobility of spirit and great hand with the lute and with lyric poetry inevitably inspire random people to help her. But, inevitably, jealously and desire interfere, and she’s carried away against her will. Here’s an example of the writing:

....Her eyes 
are dark and troubled as November seas.
Spring flowers envy her grave beauty
and the mountain ash shivers with jealousy
whenever she passes by.
Her smile flashes like a thunderbolt.
A fine painter, singer and poet,
she makes mournful melodies on her lute:
the saddest and the sweetest is ‘Cruel Fate’.

Young men buzz beyond the outer wall:
bees among the honeysuckle.

Swallows and spring days fly like shuttles
over green lawns splashed with white petals
from the branches of the pear trees.

The original poem is a Vietnamese re-interpretation, in verse, of a 17th century Chinese prose novel that was, essentially, a sensation novel—light reading of a sort popular at the time. I still have no idea why this poem, which takes place almost entirely in China, is so popular in Vietnam. It’s a bit like Beowulf, in that way—why was an 8th century Anglo-Saxon writing about Denmark? But isn’t that true of a lot of things: how many of Shakespeare’s plays actually took place in England? So many, rather randomly, took place in Renaissance Italy (perhaps because their plots were drawn from Italian short stories, but still there’s no reason not to localize them!) The translator, Timothy Allen, was rightfully criticized for not conveying the full Vietnamese context in the introduction to his translation, but all other considerations should fade in the face of true accomplishment. The poem itself is so beautiful. I hope he does other translations!

Anyway, I was like, I’ve reached an age where I want my reading to be more Song of Kieu and less A Perfect Marriage, and I have tons of classics in my library! I am a sucker for literature from a place I’ve never read about before. If you tell me this story is the national tale of Albania, I’ll hand over my money with no questions asked. So, going through my library, I see many great books.

But I’m being pitiless with the rest. I am deleting all the books I’ve read, of course. But I am also deleting the ones I’ve tried to read and have bounced off a few times. And any book with a sleazy cover I am also deleting, unless the publisher has somehow proved themselves to me (i.e. all my Hard Case Crime books can stay).

Fundamentally, this is just procrastination. What’s difficult about reading and in particular blogging about reading, is that it’s quite time-consuming. The Song of Kieu took five hours to read, but I also had to read a bunch of other books that I couldn’t write about, because there wasn’t anything worthwhile. And then there’s the hour or five it takes to compose a post. It all adds up!

Lately I’ve gotten more respect for people who actually do work. I’ve always assumed being a critic was about your prose style and sensibility. You’re just a good writer, an essayist, who has happened to turn their eye onto a particular book or literary phenomenon. But, especially when it comes to Substack writers, I want to feel as if there’s more going on. In other words, I don’t want David Brookses, writing about their conversation with their barber or the price of food at JFK. I want to feel as if a writer’s substack is only the tip of the iceberg, and that underneath there is a huge mass of intellectual activity.

But that activity is hard! It requires a lot of attention! It’s much easier to just reorganize your library! That’s why I am reorganizing my library instead of actually doing something worthwhile!

As I’ve grown older, I’ve learned to sit with my curiosity a little longer. If I read something, I’ll look for other books in the same tradition, I’ll read some background info on the author and their time, I’ll read a history of the place in question—I don’t always just cross off the book and move to the next one. Whenever I read about mimetic desire—the idea that everything we want is just stuff we’ve observed other people wanting—I think about that curiosity.

My entire life I’ve had a hunger to know things. In my twenties, when that hunger to know things was merged with a field (the arts) and a certain bullheadedness (by God I am going to learn what’s so good about this), I gained a purpose. Every time I think my curiosity might be getting exhausted, I find that it’s turned to something new, whether it’s Tang Dynasty China, or Asia Minor in the Hellenic period, or classical music. I do sometimes very maudlin about how all my knowledge will someday die (I’m like Rutger Hauer in Blade Runner (“All these moments will be lost in time…like tears in rain.”)

There is a long tradition of intellectuals disdaining idle curiosity, saying it makes the mind weak and slack. The most recent example that comes to mind is Nietzsche, who has a number of passages in Ecco Homo about how it’s not wise to read too many books, i.e:

• I have seen this with my own eyes: gifted natures with a generous and free disposition, “read to ruin” in their thirties—merely matches that one has to strike to make them emit sparks—“thoughts.”

• Early in the morning, when day breaks, when all is fresh, in the dawn of one’s strength—to read a book at such a time is simply depraved!

• My eyes alone put an end to all bookwormishness—in brief, philology: I was delivered from the “book;” for years I did not read a thing—the greatest benefit I ever conferred on myself.—That nethermost self which had, as it were, been buried and grown silent under the continual pressure of having to listen to other selves (and that is after all what reading means) awakened slowly, shyly, dubiously—but eventually it spoke again

There are a number of other quotes in this vein from other writers (Saul Bellow, “People can lose their lives in libraries. They should be warned”). I think writers tend to feel their years reading books have rendered them unmanly, and that nothing you find in a book is substitute for the concrete world.

I am not immune to this feeling. In the YA world, it’s common to celebrate reading and love of books in the abstract. Many YA readers are nerdy themselves and draw sustenance from their identity as readers (hence a lot of the bookish merch and dark academia iconography online). I sometimes wonder if I should’ve tightened my reading a long time ago—focused on writing and reading only the best things.

I once emailed an author I loved, Alison Lurie, shortly before her death, and she wrote me back thanking me for my compliments, and then saying she’d read the first few pages of my YA novel on Amazon, and it was good, but when was I going to write real fiction, something worthy of me.

To another person, this would be an anecdote about snobbishness, but I was pleased she thought I could do better! With people like Lurie and I, there’s an instinctive sympathy. It is snobbery, but not an aggressive snobbery—other people are entitled to like what they’d like. But some things are definitely better than other things. That’s why I always get along with really crusty old literary people: my political commitment to social and economic equality hasn’t been translated into a political commitment to aesthetic relativism.

And I think that’s because I genuinely do like lots of popular things. All the people defending the masses on Twitter haven’t read as many self-published romance novels as I have. Some are genuinely good! (My favorite was On The Island by Tracy Garvis-Graves). But I like to think that popular fiction sometimes rises to the level of what is timeless.

(Literary fiction is, of course, not worth mentioning. Most of it is awful, unreadable, and much less entertaining than the average popular novel.)

And there are things I am not curious about. I am content to leave TikTok and YouTube and Twitch alone. I think Twitter will have been the last time I and any of the youth were in the same place. Everyone needs to manage the bounds of their curiosity.

The point is, you have to choose what you put into your brain. Your time is the most valuable thing you have. At a certain point, reading another science fiction novel, when you’ve read a thousand in your life (as I am certain I have) becomes a waste of time. I long ago decided that reading YA novels, except for blurbing purposes, was mostly not a good use of my time: I’ve read enough YA novels to know what they’re like!

And yet I also believe in a certain expansiveness. I am the person who’ll read the latest popular thing, just to see what the hype is about. And I will read the classic that’s been forgotten. Or the self-published space opera (I really liked Jack Campbell’s Lost Fleet series, though his later ones haven’t done it for me). It would be sad to just retreat into the ivory tower and stop being curious around the world.

The thing is, I’m not a Nietzsche or even a Saul Bellow. I’m not a hero. I’m not in the process of becoming something. I’m just a person trying to have a good time. And, to me, the higher pleasure in reading comes from reading something that’s very new. The higher pleasure comes from learning about a new region of the world or a new form.

I spend my time pretty recklessly. I’ll commit to a hundred-hour audiobook on Stalin. I’ll commit to reading a five-volume Chinese novel. There’s a kind of extravagance there that appeals to me. The ability to hoard my time is also the ability to spend it. Because, really, what is the end goal? Just like the purpose of money is to spend it, the purpose of having leisure is to use it. Having fun, learning new things, stretching yourself, these are good in themselves. They don’t need to be instrumentalized. And exercising some quality control is in the end a way of simply getting a finer and deeper pleasure from literature.

I think some people read a book and they know…I’m better than this. I shouldn’t be reading this. So you stop reading that kind of book! It’s scary to potentially lose a reliable pleasure, and to give up weeks or months or years of our lives on something that might not pay dividends (I once spent a solid month reading Boleslaw Prus’s massive realist novel, The Doll, and I cannot remember the first thing about the book today). As in everything, there is a balance between the democratic and the aristocratic instinct. You want to read the best things, but you don’t want to just be reading John Cheever all the time, because at a certain point, we all know what a Cheever-ish story’ll look like, just the same as I know what a YA novel will look like.

Reading should be expansive, lavish, and fun. I think sitting alone, reading, choosing to spend your time on something intensely private, is about as decadent as you can get without breaking out the handcuffs or alcohol or hard drugs.