On Recently Returned Books

I used to go to a public library almost weekly. It was the central branch in Denver, a sprawling building on the edge of downtown, near the capitol, the art museum, and the courthouse where I got married. I was always stopping in to pick up a row of holds, or to browse the new releases, or to wander the fiction stacks on the second floor, or to check out the little used-book shop near the rear entrance, which was open only at odd hours. But my favorite spot was a shelf near the borrower-services desk, marked with a sign reading RECENTLY RETURNED.

I noticed this shelf the first time I went into the library, shortly after moving to the city, to open an account. It held a few dozen books—about as many as you’d see on a table at the front of a bookstore, where the books have earned prominence by way of being new and important, bestsellers, or staff favorites. But the books on this shelf weren’t recommended by anyone. There was no implication they were vetted or approved by a librarian or even the last borrower. That’s what amazed me. They were just random books.

At this library, the collection is spread out over multiple floors. It was too big to browse very effectively, especially when I didn’t have a genre or subject in mind. The recently returned shelf limited my choices, presenting a cross section of all removable parts of the library. Sometimes, when I was in a hurry, it was the only shelf I looked at. There were art books and manga, self-help and philosophy, biographies and thrillers, the popular mixed up with the very obscure. I liked how it reduced the scope of my options, but without imposing any one person’s taste or agenda upon me, or the generalized taste of the masses suggested by algorithms. The books on that shelf weren’t being marketed to me; they weren’t omnipresent in my social media feeds. They were often old and very often ugly. I came to think of that shelf as an escape from hype. It was negative hype. It was anti-curation.

Picking them up, I half expected the books to be warm, like just-vacated seats. Some still contained the life detritus of the last person to open them: makeshift bookmarks with identifying information, boarding passes or receipts; oil stains or flecks of melted chocolate (I also read while eating); even drops of blood. An eyelash. Sometimes the books made me itchy, and I would know the last borrower had a dog. Sometimes there were clusters of related books that must have been checked out by the same patron. These books always conjured a borrower—a faceless but familiar stranger. It was like getting to look at someone’s nightstand. It was everyone’s nightstand, an average of all nightstands. A manifest version of collective consciousness.

There were sometimes funny juxtapositions: a book of dessert recipes called Butter Celebrates! right next to The Miracle of Fasting. A book called Finding Masculinity next to Wicca for One. It’s possible that someone on the staff was arranging the books to amuse themselves. But I think the jokes would appear spontaneously, even without purposeful intervention. Randomness is interesting. It’s why professional poker players pay so much to see the flop. Suddenly your bad cards could get interesting, could turn into a straight or a flush draw. Suddenly you’re glad you didn’t fold.

I took books from that shelf I never would have sought out otherwise—once, a Rachael Ray book I probably grabbed on impulse because I was hungry. I don’t think of myself as a Rachael Ray person. It turned out not to be a cookbook exactly, but a kind of food diary recording her meals every day for a year, full of nonprofessional snapshots, badly lit and poignantly mediocre: the simple dishes she cooks for her husband over and over, her mother’s requests on holidays, multiple variations on deviled eggs. She doesn’t describe it this way, but it demonstrates a sort of recursive model for cooking, where bits of yesterday’s dinner end up in tonight’s, and bits of tonight’s in tomorrow’s, and so on—like you’re giving your food a sense of memory. I read it twice before returning it, and years later, I still think about it. Food is so personal. Anything you do every day—that’s your life.

On another occasion, I found an orange paperback called What Should We Be Worried About?, in which scientists and scholars pontificate on threats to human existence: Which are the most urgent, the worst of our worries? I never read the book, but I kept it around for months, letting it autorenew, looking at the spine and sort of meditating on the title: What should we be worried about? Then it was due, and I took it back.

* * *

In the early weeks of lockdown, the spring of 2020, the library was closed—not that we would have gone in if it were open. My husband and I were probably excessively cautious about indoor spaces, where we’d have to breathe the same air as strangers. I remember missing the library intensely during that time. I missed the abundance of free reading material, the low commitment of books I could flip through once and never look at again. I also missed the strangers, the not-quite-strangers who live in your city, the ones you never meet but repeatedly see.

I decided I would buy almost no books that year, and instead try to read the many books in our own library I hadn’t gotten to yet. Our apartment in Denver had a long wall with no doors or windows, which we filled with a row of seven dark Billy bookcases from IKEA. I was proud of that wall of books, and anyone who entered our apartment always commented on its beauty. Every single maintenance guy who came to fix our toilet or replace an appliance over ten years remarked on those shelves.

We often sold books, but new ones came in, and the shelves were always at full capacity. There was a row of books on the very top of the shelves too, mostly reference texts and art books and anthologies. The rest was a mix of fiction and nonfiction arranged in alphabetical order by author. I’m always surprised when writers have no organizational system for their books, or arrange them by color. Under our system, I can go to our shelves to see if we have a book John has acquired without my knowledge, or owned since before we met, without having to know what it looks like. But also, I prefer the look of spines in random color patterns. This randomness looks beautiful to me, an aesthetic in itself.

It occurs to me now that I should have asked John to re-create the serendipity effect of the library by pulling a selection of books off our own shelves for me. It would have been akin to the home version of Chopped we sometimes play, when he brings home a “basket” of four surprise ingredients I have to incorporate into dinner. Once it was pork chops, radishes, arugula, and marmalade. Pork chops are fine, but I never buy them, and I don’t like marmalade. Yet it was a good dinner. I sautéed half the radishes in butter, and put the others in a salad. I used the marmalade to make a vinaigrette.

I had already been working from home for years, but that March, John was still teaching in person, so every time he left the house he stopped for more groceries. We wanted a full freezer. One Monday he got up early and went to Whole Foods right when it opened. He came back visibly shaken by the experience, the atmosphere of panic. The store was so crowded people kept bumping into him, so he immediately threw all his clothes in the wash and got in the shower. We didn’t really know how the virus spread yet. Unpacking the groceries, I felt like crying. It was so much like our game. The store had been cleaned out of staples, so the bags were a haphazard mix of exotic treats—bison steaks, miso broth, fresh halibut. He had thought to get tomato paste and a backup jar of mayonnaise. The only olive oil they had looked expensive, something Spanish, a green bottle with a cork. We eventually found other oil, so I used the green bottle sparingly. It took on a mysterious significance, reminding me always of that precipice in time when the future felt unusually unknowable. I kept it long after it was empty, and couldn’t bring myself to throw it away until we moved.

Back then, cooking was the only time I felt normal. I made a curry with the halibut, and topped it with the last of a bunch of fresh mint we had in the fridge. The next night I made pork chops—so like our game!—with grits and braised kale, and the following night I made a hash with the leftover pork. It was like a little puzzle, figuring out what to cook for dinner—starting with whatever was most perishable, limiting what I took from the freezer or pantry, incorporating scraps or bits of sauce from previous meals. Recursively.

I often thought about how much of “normal life” I had taken for granted. Before, when I had needed something, or simply wanted it, I could just go out and get it. I had never appreciated that my routines weren’t dangerous. I know this thought is not original—in fact it strikes me as profoundly unoriginal. In fact it seemed like everyone I knew was having all the same feelings in the same order. First, I feared my parents wouldn’t take the risk of the virus seriously enough. I started talking to them every day—pressuring my father, an internist, to close his office—and after a few weeks, a little less often, when we ran out of things to say. Nothing new was happening. I watched a movie on my laptop, hyperaware of how often the characters touched their own faces. I had an anxiety dream that I’d accidentally gone to a party. I had a wish-fulfillment dream about grocery shopping, filling my cart with specialty meats and good olives at the deli. I went on a walk and felt like I was playing a live-action video game, trying to stay six feet away from other walkers and joggers at all times, while also trying not to get hit by a car. When I told my friends these things, or shared any recent observation or impression at all, they always said, Me too! or, Exact same. We were all struggling to focus on reading and work. We were having the same dreams.

Over the course of that first month, I read for longer and longer stretches, as though building my strength back up after an injury. When I couldn’t read and wasn’t working or sleeping, I chain-smoked crosswords, a kind of verbal solitaire that made a decent substitute for human conversation. One night I read for hours without looking at my phone. By mid-April, I felt that my reading comprehension and concentration were getting back to normal. When I called my best friend, who lived in Brooklyn with her husband and toddler, she too was feeling better; she’d reached a semi-Zen plane of acceptance. Same feelings, same order. It was as if our interior lives that once felt so variegated, so individual, were just the result of having slightly different experiences at different times. We were not as unique as we thought—or we needed more input, more life in our lives, to make it so.

* * *

The COVID pandemic has coincided nearly exactly with my forties, making it hard to account for changes. Which is the true cause—of certain new anxieties, of new types of pain in my back—my age or this widespread collapse, this near-constant threat? Another change is less change—less welcome change, in any case. I meet fewer people; I seem to have less time to try new things. I often think about taking a class, but never do it. I think about how varied my friends were in college, with their many different interests. They’ve gone on to be lawyers or physicists, architects or programmers. Now almost all my friends are writers.

I always thought the term “midlife crisis” was quaint, but now that I’m here, in the middle of my life, I feel the full force of the word “crisis.” Its Grecian drama. The Germans have a good word for it too: Torschlusspanik, or “shut-door panic”—“fear of being on the wrong side of a closing gate.” That reminds me of Virginia Woolf’s remark in her journal, after attending a friend’s funeral: “Of course I shall lie there too before that gate and slide in.” You know all your life that you’re going to die, but you don’t really know it, until you cross that fold. It feels like a crisis of faith, but faith in what? Not God, not in my case. Perhaps an unspoken belief I hadn’t realized I needed to function, an unexamined assumption that my life would continue getting better. That making good choices would lead to more freedom. I hadn’t known, really known, that there would be fewer choices. The belief depends on choices, on multiple paths with unpredictable end points. On still-open gates. That is faith, isn’t it? Belief in what you can’t know? Chance is a kind of hope.

In the summer of 2021, my mother and John’s father, by misfortunate coincidence, were both hospitalized with sepsis—my mother in Texas, my father-in-law in Connecticut. For a week I was prepared to fly to one or the other. We clung to our phones, waiting for news that would force a decision. (“Crisis” has its origin in medical settings—the turning point in an illness.) At the end of that week, my mother went home, exhausted but alive. It’s the kind of condition that can weaken you forever. My father-in-law was eventually transferred to a different facility, but he never made it home. He died that fall. I remembered the year that my mother’s mother and John’s father’s mother, our last surviving grandparents, both left us, in their nineties. Until they were dead, it hadn’t really seemed possible that our parents could die too—rather, that they would die too. This was an illusion—as if things would all happen in order. After John’s father’s death, we ourselves felt more fragile.

There is the terror of too much uncertainty, and then there is the horror of knowing too much. The imagined versus the actual. I have a friend whose therapist tells him, “You know too much to be happy”—meaning, it’s too hard to live when you believe you can see how the rest of your life will play out. That may be what I miss most about youth: unknowing without fear. The future felt longer, yes—I was so rich with time, I could waste as much as I wanted—but not only longer. It was blanker.

* * *

We spent all our years in Denver in the same apartment, because every time our lease renewal came up, we’d consider the effort of moving and decide to stay put. By the spring of 2022, the third year of the pandemic, we were finally ready to do the work. We packed all our things, eighty or ninety boxes of books, and moved back to New England, temporarily settling in John’s hometown. We hoped it might be our last big move. I had doubts and regrets, and people could tell, but I told them, “Change is good.” I don’t actually think that all change is good. That would be delusional. I suppose I meant, change might be good. Good change is possible.

There’s a used bookstore not far from John’s childhood home, called the Book Barn, where we’ve spent many hours and dollars. It’s a chain of old buildings, with little garden paths between, a little pen with some goats you can feed. The best part, especially when the weather is nice, are the outdoor shelves of new arrivals, just behind the desk where you bring books to sell. The new arrivals aren’t in any order yet, and the staff buys a lot of books—new books and old books, classics and trash. They’ve often been sold and resold. The pages are often foxed. It’s a very lucky bookstore. I almost always find something I’ve been looking for, and it feels especially lucky when it’s among the new arrivals, like I’ve come just in time.

Sometimes John goes to the bookstore alone and brings home something he thinks I might like, some book I’ve never heard of, a four-dollar risk, and it makes me happy. I need that in my life. I need randomness to be happy.



The Stupid Classics Book Club

At a party several years ago, John and I and two friends decided to start up a “Stupid Classics Book Club.” It began as a joke, and then struck us as a genuinely good idea. The project of this book club would be to read all the corny stuff from the canon that we really should have read in school but never had. I pulled out a notebook, and we spent the next hour and a half in a corner, coming up with a list of stupid classics. As we went along, we had to figure out exactly what we meant by “stupid.” We did not mean “lacking in intelligence,” or “bad.” For me, “stupid” meant relatively short, accessible enough to be on a high school syllabus, and probably rehashed into cliché over time by multiple film adaptations and Simpsons episodes. The quintessential example was Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. Anything too long or serious—Proust, Middlemarch—was excluded from the list, even if we all wanted to read it, due to failing those criteria. We did not assume any of the classics would actually be stupid.

We were wrong on that last count. The first book we chose to read was Fahrenheit 451. We’d all read some Ray Bradbury as kids, but not this one. A couple of weeks later, when my friend Mike texted to say he had almost finished it, I texted back, “No spoilers.” He responded with a semi-spoiler: “It’s … good for this book club.” I opened it up and read the first page:

It was a pleasure to burn.

It was a special pleasure to see things eaten, to see things blackened and changed. With the brass nozzle in his fists, with this great python spitting its venomous kerosene upon the world, the blood pounded in his head, and his hands were the hands of some amazing conductor playing all the symphonies of blazing and burning to bring down the tatters and charcoal ruins of history. With his symbolic helmet numbered 451 on his stolid head, and his eyes all orange flame with the thought of what came next, he flicked the igniter and the house jumped up in a gorging fire that burned the evening sky red and yellow and black.

I’m not always against laying it on thick, but I knew from the first sentence that I wasn’t going to like this. After thirty or forty pages, I texted Mike: “This book is so dumb it should be burned.” In the end, all four of us hated it. You might think the book’s central message (censorship is bad) is inherently noble, but not quite: Bradbury wrote it in response to his own critics, critics who had pointed out that his work was racist, sexist, and xenophobic. That motivation is present in the text. It’s defensive and reactionary. But just in case you missed it, Bradbury spelled it out in a coda to the book he wrote in 1979:


Copyright © 2024 by Elisa Gabbert