Ex Libris: Next Year’s Reading
By Steve Donoghue
Just last week I got back from a hot and humid round of tedious errands and encountered the usual: a small pile of book-packages on the front porch.
This is always a cheering prospect, don’t get me wrong. I’ve been receiving books from publishers for many years, but I very vividly remember all the years when that kind of situation would have been a dream come true, something beyond fantasy. For many years, I’d walk through bookstores (or worked in them) making endless mental lists of all the new books I wanted but couldn’t afford. During all of those years, if I’d have returned home from a work shift and found a bunch of those books sitting on my doorstep, I’d have danced a jig.
I didn’t dance a jig last week – it was just too sticky, and my dancing-joints aren’t exactly as limber as they once were – but the sight cheered me up a bit.
But one of those book-packages made me grumble even before I opened it. It was a little envelope from the New York Review of Books.
Again, don’t get me wrong: I love the New York Review of Books, and like everybody else, I consider it one of the foremost English-language review and criticism journals in the world. I missed its first few issues back in the early 1960s – it took a bit of time for word to fizz and pop its way out of New York and into my tidy little Boston bubble. And I won’t deny that the relationship ever since has sometimes been rocky, particularly when the journal’s excessive politicizing seemed to crowd out the whole “books” part. Mostly, though, the feeling of settling in with a big new issue of the NYRB is pure bliss.
But it wasn’t a big new issue of the NYRB that was waiting for me – it was an envelope that seemed to have a book in it. The NRYB has been publishing its own imprint of paperback reprints since 1999.
In the quarter-century since, they’ve published hundreds of books, brought dozens and dozens of long-forgotten or neglected titles and authors at least briefly back into the limelight and made them the subjects of the ongoing critical conversation, for good or ill.
I’ve mostly thought it was for ill, and that’s been pretty frustrating over the years. I’ve always had the strong impression that the NYRB’s reprint list is chosen and guided and entirely fueled by passion. I’ve had no doubt that there were genuine, passionate readers selecting these authors, maybe sometimes acting on life-long dreams to get favorite writers back into currency.
The problem: those passions have almost never even remotely resembled my own passions. Sure, there were occasional volumes of figures like Dante, the occasional reprint of a good biography or book of essays, and of course they made a very nice and much-needed new edition of Vassily Grossman’s great novel “Life and Fate.” But those have been exceptions. Mostly, the authors and titles the NYRB has reprinted over the years have been things I wouldn’t buy for a dime. I’ve encountered dozens of them in giveaways and Little Free Libraries over the years – and left them right where I found them.
My optimism is evergreen, but even so – I didn’t exactly get my hopes up about that little envelope.
But once I’d cooled off and showered and fussed over my bossy little Schnauzer, once I’d settled down to open all those packages, I had a little surprise: the NYRB package wasn’t a reprinted novel by some fourth-rate European poetaster at all! Rather, it was a small red New York Review of Books notebook, a stylish little thing full of blank pages. Right there in the midst of all those new and forthcoming titles was a tiny book that hadn’t been written yet.
I’ve had small notebooks like this before. I make religiously heavy use of them. I turn them into commonplace books, jotting down memorable lines from what I’m reading. I turn them into reading journals, keeping lists of the books I’m acquiring and reading, maybe with quick reminders of what I thought about them. I use them to jot down book prices, or to note important book-details from a given month (this year’s scandalous long list for the Booker Prize, for instance). Gradually, over the course of months, the notebook fills up and starts to fall apart.
It’s an old, old reflex on my part, long since outdated. After all, I have a Notes function on my iPhone, and I’ve synced it with my storage cloud, so those jottings are available to me at any time, from any device, searchable by any phrase or word. No fumbling with crumbling old notebooks. No vain attempts to decipher my own handwriting. And always with me, never – inevitably – out of reach in some other room.
Even so, I’ll use this little red notebook, and I’ll fill it up over the course of the rest of the year. I wonder what will be in it, by New Year’s Eve? Which books will win the National Book Awards? Who’ll take the Nobel Prize in literature? Which authors will get canceled, or make fools of themselves, or die? Where will I be, as a reader, in the middle of a winter that’s still many months away?
I’ll take notes, and with a little luck, I’ll report back.