It is a truth universally acknowledged around my house that the Friends of the Library sale is one of my favorite weeks of the year, which I admit is a strange thing to say about a fundraiser held in a room full of folding tables. The reason is the last day. That’s when they hand you a box and charge you $5 to fill it — not $5 a book, $5 for the box, however much you can get into it. For a certain kind of person that last day is the best of times. For whoever must help me carry the box out to the car, it is the worst of times.
My evidence that this is the right way to read is the last month or so. In my younger and more vulnerable years I got handed the wrong books at the wrong moments, the way most people do, and I went my whole life after that without ever reading some timeless authors like Kurt Vonnegut, for no particular reason. Then in late July I read Mother Night. Then it was Player Piano. I’m finishing Slaughterhouse-Five this week (probably already finished by the time you are reading this) and I’ve already picked out a fourth, and all this happened, more or less, inside of a single month, which probably tells you the condition I’m in better than anything else I could put here.
I couldn’t summarize those books for you and I’m not going to try, because that isn’t really what happened to me anyway. What happened is the voice. From the first page there was a man talking to me, funny in a way that kept turning out to be serious and serious in a way that kept ducking back into a joke before it could get self-important, and by the end of the first one you could call me a convert. Three different novels, same man talking and that’s the thing no description of any of them that would have signaled how much I would enjoy reading them.
Which brings me to something I believe more strongly every year, which is that I don’t think there’s really such a thing as a person who doesn’t like reading. I think there are people who haven’t found the voice they like yet. Happy readers are all alike, more or less, everybody who gave up on reading gave up in their own particular way, usually over one book, usually a long time ago. We don’t accept that reasoning anywhere else in life, nobody says they don’t like music, they say they don’t like country, or they don’t like whatever racket that neighbor kids keeps making. But reading somehow gets treated as one undivided thing you’re either built for or you aren’t and people tend to decide around 15 which kind of person they are and then carry that verdict around with them for the next 50 years.
What somebody in that position needs isn’t encouragement, it’s volume. They need to be able to try eight writers and give up on six of them without it costing anything, because the whole problem is that the search got shut down after one or two tries. That’s why I love the box. Five dollars for everything you can carry is a permission slip to not love every book you buy and try things outside of your normal comfort zone. You can grab something because the cover looked strange or the first sentence landed, take it home, read 40 pages, wake up one morning from uneasy dreams and decide the voice isn’t yours, and then quit with a completely clear conscience, because you didn’t buy that book, you bought a box. Nobody quits a $15 hardcover on page 40, and everybody should feel no pressure to not quit books they aren’t enjoying on page 40, because that’s how you eventually find the one you can’t put down.
So bring a box and bring a bigger one than you think you need. And if anybody spots a Vonnegut in there, read it and let me know if you make it to the 41st page.
