Reading and Reading Again

About 30 years ago I divested myself of the bulk of the library I’d been lugging around from apartment to apartment since my undergraduate days, mostly literature books, a dozen boxes full, that I scattered among three used bookstores. I kept only those books that I definitely wanted to read again or thought I might have reason to make reference to. That ended up being a manageable four boxes, or two or three bookshelves worth. I’ve added to that since, probably tripling the shelf space, but I still only keep books that I want to read again or make reference to sometime in the future. But at the library this morning it struck me that that future is now. For the past year, since my retirement, I’ve been regularly going to the library, checking out one or two books each week, most often from the new releases section (there has yet to be a week where something didn’t strike my interest, be it a history of baseball, a collection of American humor, or a biography of George Washington). I probably could keep this regime up indefinitely. But what about all those books in my study that I’ve been meaning to reread “later”? At this point, when would later be? The obvious revision in my reading schedule is to begin either alternating reading new books with previously read books or simultaneously reading the new and the previous. I sidestepped that choice this morning in the library by checking out Hemingway’s A Moveable Feast, an older work that isn’t in my study and that I don’t recall having read before.

Library

I was at the library, browsing among new releases, when I heard a group of young boys, 12-ish, coming up the stairs, excited, apparently with an adult (“Be quiet! Quiet!” every time their voices rose, which was often). Then what struck me as an odd observation by one of the boys: “They have books at the library?!” And the group then proceeded to the computer terminals to surf the web, check their Facebook pages, whatever.

Now I suppose this could have, and might have (I’d like to be generous), been merely a cute, ironic comment by a precocious kid. Surely one would hope that a 12-ish boy would have been introduced to a library with books before this, if only at school. But still, if only an ironic quip, it reveals the shift that clearly has gone and is going on in both books and libraries. It might not be unimaginable that books are becoming the province of bookstores (at least for a while) and homes (some), and that libraries are where you go to rent DVDs or get online. And that might not necessarily be all that bad a thing. I’ve been reading myself more and more newspapers and magazines online and reading more and more of my books on my computer and iPhone. I can’t imagine ever not mostly reading hard-copy books, bought, borrowed, or checked out. But it’s becoming much easier to imagine a 12-ish boy never reading a book or article except online or otherwise digitally. And again, I don’t know that it’s something to rally the defenders of the Book of Kells to the ramparts. It may just be inevitable progress. Or at least inevitable.