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| Illustration by: MissABeet |
Eulogy to some lost friends: printed books and their big, yellow plastic coffin.
One Saturday morning, after a big clear-out, I’m off to the dump. It should be a fairly straightforward task to execute; so easy that my husband has trusted it to me while he carries on with his ruthless purge of soft toys, gadgets and artefacts.
It is nearly very easy. The china ornaments tumble into the big skips with a satisfying crash; I never liked them anyway. The clothes and soft toys slide smugly off down their chute to some sort of new home or good cause. But then I get to the big yellow plastic tub filled with books.
Now, it was a necessary cull, I’ll admit that. Our bookshelves were full, and recently we have been unable to see the time on the alarm clock because of the tower of books blocking the view on my side of the bed. And we are progressive digital readers now; half of those books can be uploaded to our Kindles for free, or close enough. And yet, it is hard to let them go; these battered, bath soaked, yellowy, crumpled old buddies. I pick them up one by one and remember exactly where I was, what I was feeling, and how things were when I was reading them.
Lorna Doone by RD Blackmore and I have a long acquaintance. My mum read it to me when I was about ten after someone had given it to me as a present – presumably because we share a name as I can’t think of any other reason to give that book to a ten-year-old! I don’t think I took much of it in at the time, but I did love snuggling up and being read to. I probably fell asleep half the time, and I do hope my mother had the sense to skip large chunks of it. We must have made it to the end though, because the one bit I do remember was when Lorna got shot in the church on her wedding day. I don’t know what happened to that particular edition, but the soon to be dumped one was the one I reread when I first moved to London, ten years later, in my shabby shared house in Bounds Green, with its Pringle tube ashtray and its mildewed bathroom. Lorna Doone made me want to run away to the West Country and get married to some strapping farm boy in some quaint rural church – although without the shooting, obviously. I never did manage any of that.
Passage To India by EM Forster – a long term companion, this one. We met at school, during A-Levels and have kept up ever since. I still have my original school copy, minus its back cover but with all its highlights and annotations. In fact, I’ve just taken absolutely ages to write this paragraph because I’ve been distracted by skimming through it all over again. I’ve never thought of it as just another novel about Colonial India as some people have. It’s a novel about the complications and ‘muddles’ of existing closely with people so different from you and the need for ‘Goodwill and more goodwill and more goodwill’ or ‘kindness, and more kindness and kindness again.' I can’t associate this novel with any particular time or place because it’s been read in so many. It’s always been with me.
Brave New World by Aldous Huxley – encountered on a long trip around India. It’s a strange book to read in India, but I have associated the two ever since. Reading it in dorms shared with strangers and cockroaches, and on trains crammed with people in luggage compartments definitely heightened the disturbing atmosphere of the dystopia. In the tub/coffin, I also find the copy of War and Peace I traded for some forgotten book at the end of the trip. I’m afraid I never got past the first few chapters. I tip that one in fairly cheerfully.
A tatty old Penguin Classic with very little in the way of a cover, and crinkled pages from reading in the bath in my early twenties: Emma. Several of my other Austen books look this way, along with Hardy’s that were read around the same time. Emma is my favourite though; I love the way she is so flawed and idiotic about everything, and the way the man who really loved her was there all along. Come to think of it, one of the drawbacks of Kindle reading is that you can never read in the bath again. What a shame. Austen and long baths are firmly linked in my head.
Human Traces by Sebastian Faulks kept me company after a tonsillectomy, with two weeks off work. It’s a great sick bed book, this one, because it is so weighty – in both size and idea. And really sad by the end; ideal for two weeks on your own with no one to see you crying.
The newest book in that yellow plastic tub was also the last book I read in paper form before I turned to digital reading: a hardback copy of The Casual Vacancy. I’ve also got this on my Kindle, since I got it around the same time and didn’t want to take a heavy hardback on holiday with me. So I started in print book form and finished it on my Kindle. It was my ‘Book Club’ choice, and I simply couldn’t work out why no one loved it quite as much as I did. For me, it was really an ‘all life is here’ type of read and, like the Potter books, character comes first. I have absolutely met every one of those inhabitants of Pagford. Rowling treats them with the tart—yet affectionate—mockery of Jane Austen, and the compassion of EM Forster. It was my last ‘real’ book before the Kindle and took me from print to digital reading, so I feel it deserves a special mention.
There were so many more old companions in that yellow rubber tub that I can’t give them all an elaborate eulogy. But I said each one a silent thank you and farewell as I dropped them in the recycling skip on Saturday. And much as I’ve lost some old chums, I’ve gained many more because I can fit hundreds on a digital e-reader and still see the time from the bed. And the old favourites are still there—it’s a kind of afterlife I suppose. Life moves on, and so must those books.
Except for Passage To India. I couldn’t do it. That one is still there. I’m reading it again.
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