Ellipses / A Reader Blog from Wendy Kirkwood

September 18, 2019

I bought Arrowsmith more than a dozen years ago. Not from a used bookshop, but from one of the big stores before they went all cyber-cafe. Barnes & Noble or Borders or Books-A-Million. I don’t remember which.

It’s funny, really. Maybe more ironic than funny. I’m sitting in a small dusty independent book shop right now, sorting through a pile of books I’m thinking about purchasing. Stores like this one were all but made extinct by the big chains a few years back. Now, like LPs in the age of CDs, or CDs in the age of Instant Downloads, they’re making a comeback.

The small bookshops always have the best names. The Open Book, Tattered Cover, The Book Cellar, and where I am right now, Page & Turner’s.

Ryan doesn’t understand why I like this place so much. He bought me an E-book six years ago and told me to “wake up and smell the tech. Besides,” he has said at least a dozen times, “E-books save trees. Don’t you care about the environment?”

The first time he said it, he did so with a leading smile, and every time since then, with increasing disappointment and a trailing disdain.

I’m sorry. I just love books. There’s something rare and wonderful about the feel of one in my hands. It’s a subtly different experience every time a page is turned. Sometimes the page sticks, sometimes I have to wet my finger to grab hold of the edge (yes, I admit it, I lick my finger to do this and you don’t need to remind me how unsanitary that is). It’s the work, too...the effort. I turn a page because I want to...not because it’s expected of me. Turning a page gives me time to think, to wonder, to anticipate, and even to feel frustrated if the words that follow don’t live up to my expectations.

With an E-book, I press a button, the page flips with eerily perfect symmetry. It always flips because it’s programmed to. Did you know the “E” in E-book didn’t always mean “Envrionmentally-friendly”? They changed it from “Electronic” seven years ago to guilt...I mean entice a new generation of readers away from real books. I guess the “f” in friendly wasn’t important enough to be included in the abbreviation. Actually, that’s fine with me. I don’t think they’re friendly at all. E-books are cold, no matter how soft and pretty their leather covers.

Page & Turner’s closes at ten, but I still have about 20 minutes to choose from among three classic Stephen King novels, a fat poetry collection, that once-controversial Chelsea Clinton novel, “Breakwater,” and what appears to be the last book Michael Crichton wrote before his disappearance, “Invisible.” (I wonder if that was his original title for it, or some marketing department’s idea of a clever, if somewhat insensitive, sales tactic.) 

I’m going to buy three books today. I’ll read them all before I’m back here next week.

But I opened this post with a mention of another book, Arrowsmith, by Sinclair Lewis. I haven’t finished it yet. I only read a few pages every year. Ryan doesn’t bother laughing at that anymore and he’s well beyond shaking his head in dismay. It’s become like the cross-shaped birthmark on my left hip. That was a little distracting to him at first (and not just because of his atheism) - but now he doesn’t even notice.

I’m using Sinclair Lewis’ story about the life of Martin Arrowsmith to prolong my own life. It has become the right-side bookend for a growing collection of read-and-remembered stories that began with Go Dog Go. I’ll read at least a hundred more books cover to cover before I finish this one. That’s not because it’s such a slow read - though it is dense and plodding at times and loaded with medical and scientific jargon that make me wonder just who was on the Pulitzer committee in 1926.

No, the reason I won’t finish it is because I’m not yet ready to die. In a perfect world, I’ll be 110 years old and three pages from the end when I expire of natural causes.

Of course it’s not a perfect world. I am reminded of this every Thursday when I go to the clinic for a refresh of my chemo-meds.

“Soon,” they’re saying now. “Soon we’ll have a universal cancer cure.” This time, I think they mean it. I really do.

It won’t be soon enough to help me. That’s okay. Mine is a managed pain. It will be a managed death, too.

But I don’t mean to get all maudlin. I mean, how could anyone be maudlin in a beautiful place like this? A little earlier the evening light was streaming in the clerestory windows, and as a customer walked up the quivering spiral stairs to the reference section, dozens of dust tornadoes spun in celebration of paper and ink.

Oh, and the smell, here...glorious. Must and leather, history and adventure. I’ll capture the scent and put a link right here for those of you tech heads out there, who, like my husband, have to get every plug-in possible for your IC or your computer or your iPhone.

I might take a bit of a blogging break in a few weeks. It’s time for a vacation. A real one with lots of real books and no Internet access. Yes, on purpose. But don’t worry. I’ll be back. And you can be assured of at least two things - I’ll have more book reviews for you...and none of them will be for Arrowsmith. Because it’s not time for me to finish it. Nope. Not yet.

Not yet.

Posted - 21:45:23