Bookmobile Nights

By my bedside, balanced in precarious stacks and columns, about 40 books  represent a rough count of ones I've read, am waiting to read, want to re-read, plus ones I started and put down, but which one day may lure me to their pages anew.

If your bedside looks anything like mine, then you'll probably derive comfort, as I did, from "Why I Can't Stop Reading Books," an essay by Joe Queenan published in today's New York Times Book Review.

In a piece brimming with nostalgia about the role of the Bookmobile, along with beckoning descriptions of bibliographic rabbit holes, it's Queenan's counter-intuitive explanation of his consumption method that most heartened me.

"Friends say that I suffer from a short attention span, but exactly the opposite is true. I do not stop reading books because I lose interest in them; if anything, I have too long an attention span, one that allows me to read dozens of books simultaneously without losing interest in any of them."

Queenan's eclectic reading list is another treat. It also raises a question, one that brings to mind the barbarians of the ubiquituous and, to some, wrongheaded Capital One ads:

"What's by your bedside?"

(1953 Bookmobile images: Harrison County, Miss. Library)

Comments

[Joanna]

Hi Chip!
Bedside currently has:
"The Root of Wild Madder" by Brian Murphy
"The Soccer War by Ryszard Kapuscinski
"The Glass Castle" by Jeannette Walls
"Open Ground" by Seamus Heaney
"The Known World" by Edward P. Jones
"Middlesex" by Jeffrey Eugenides
"Dinner with Persephone" by Patricia Storace
"The Wal-Mart Effect" by Charles Fishman
---Joanna K. in Athens, Greece

[Chip]

Thanks, Joanna. Great to hear from you.

Chip

p.s. My wife just finished Middlesex. I'd found it hard to begin but will take another shot.

[Glynn]

Hi Chip

At the moment...
"Angel Laughter" Ralph McTell
"Supping with the Devils" Hugo Young
"Faraday" James Hamilton
"Rising '44" Norman Davies
"Roosevelt" Roy Jenkins
"Isaac Newton" James Gleick

Glynn. S. in Stoke-on-Trent, England.

[Chip]

Thanks, Glynn.
Just last night I received an Amazon gift certificate. I think I now know how to spend it.
Chip

[paul]

Help, the books are taking over!!!
Books currently creeping up into my bed:
Best American Short Stories 2005 edited by Michael Chabon
The Grunch of Giants by Buckminster Fuller
Authoritarianism by Hannah Ahrendt
Superstud: Or How I Became a 24-year-old Virgin by Paul Feig
The Creators by Daniel Boorstein
The Discoverers by Daniel Boorstein
As well as several writing books from the list you created a while back Chip.
My wife has trouble accepting the bibliomania that has created an unsafe situation in the narrow path between my side of the bed and the wall.
Such is life.
Thanks for the blog Chip. Take care.

[Chip]

Thanks, Paul. I love Chabon's work, so any collection edited by him is worth adding.
Chip

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