from deviant art
Certain books trigger particular memories in much the same way that scents often do.
The other day, while going through our books to weed them out and take some of them to Goodwill, I ran across The Thorn Birds, Colleen McCullough’s beautiful novel about a love affair between an Australian woman and a priest, and suddenly, I was in the bookstore in Vero Beach where I had bought this book in 1977. I had never heard of the author or the book before then, but the cover captured me. I remember taking the book to work with me every day and reading it on my lunch hour. I was working as a librarian and Spanish teacher in a prison for juvenile offenders and that story whisked me right out of that world and into the one McCullough wrote about so eloquently.
During this same excursion through our books, I ran across Looking for Carroll Beckwith, the True Stories of a Detective’s Search for His Past. What the title doesn’t tell you is that Beckwith was tracking down one of his own past lives and his story is quite compelling. I came across it the year it was published, in 1999, and remember devouring it at the gym and while waiting in line to pick up Megan after school. When I finished it, I gave it to my dad to read. He was living with us then, my mother was in an Alzheimer’s facility, and I felt it would open him to the possibility of reincarnation. It did.
In 1975, I was teaching Spanish to hormonal middle schoolers – grades 6, 7, 8. One day, a kid named Bryan handed me Stephen King’s Salem’s Lot. “Read this, Ms. Trish. You’ll love it. This King guy is really good.”
Bryan was a rabble rouser, so I had my doubts about the book. But Bryan was also an avid reader and knew his books. Turns out he was right about this one. Salem’s Lot was King’s second novel, but the first by him that I’d read. In the years since, I’ve bought just about everything King has written. Because of the association between Bryan and King, I’ve always remembered the rabble rouser!
Somewhere in the early 1980s, right around the time I met Rob, I was in a used bookstore and came across a book by Vonda McIntyre, Dreamsnake. I had never read anything by her, but the title and the cover were so compelling, I bought it. This book remains one of my favorites, a kind of shamanic quest through a post-nuclear world.
And these are just a handful of books with vivid memories attached to them. I somehow don’t think e-books will ever live up to this kind of thing. I like my Nook, I recognize the value of e-books, I understand that publishing is moving more and more in this direction. But there’s something so intimate and mysterious about holding an actual book, turning the pages, marking the spot where you stop and start reading again. E-books, in their present form, can never be a substitute for that.
On the bookshelf next to my desk I keep certain books that speak to me: Walter Tevis’s Queen’s Gambit, Philip Pullman’s The Golden Compass, one of the Harry Potter books, Scott Spencer’s Endless Love, The Hunger Games, The Shining, Dean Koontz’s Watchers are a among them. They get me through times when I’m blocked in a novel, when things don’t feel right and I’m not sure why, when my characters just aren’t behaving or cooperating. They push me forward.
The non-fiction books remind me that the world is much more mysterious and magnificent than we know. I sometimes rotate these books, depending on what I’m writing. I don’t think e-books will ever serve this same purpose for me. I mean, honestly, how can you rotate e-books? How can e-books display a spine, a title, a cover and pages that I can touch and turn?
I learned to read when I discovered comic books. I saved my comic books, hoarded them, kept them in neat stacks in my closet. When we moved from Caracas to the U.S., my parents tossed out all my comic books. I didn’t realize that until we were in the States, unpacking, and when I discovered what they had done, I was devastated. The comic books, like my books today, also held memories. And, I should add, some of them would bring a tidy sum of money today.
It’s odd, the things that trigger memories. For some people, it’s a certain smell, a view, a place. For me, it’s books. Actual books. The real thing. For me, it’s the title, the art on the cover, the back copy, and then the pages and the story. You dive in. You get lost. And when you surface for air, your world is changed.
Gypsy, a few years ago I went to our local library, large main downtown branch, where I hadn’t been in a long while. I was doing some research and at the time had no computer at home. Well, to my dismay, I discovered the library had disposed of all card files and had become completely computerized, and guess what? The computers were down. So, no way to search for what I needed and the library might as well have closed its doors. No back-up card files in a library system? No redundency in the event of power outages and computer failures in a library? Right then, I KNEW I would always, always back up my most important work (I was in process of setting up a home computer) with hard copy. What good are discs and CDs with no power? We MUST begin to think this way, because that day is coming when we will need candles and matches and lanterns, pencils and pens and papers. I know this. I’m not being a pessimist. I simply know it.
What a beautiful post! I couldn’t agree more, my books also speak to me of former experiences. Must be the ex-librarian in me also. 🙂
I had forgotten you were once a librarian, too. I was never too organized as a librarian, but that love of books stuck with me!
From a technical point of view, one of the most critical issues with the world going from paper to electronics in virtually every aspect of our lives, is that we seem to be edging toward the precipice when we may potentially lose the global electronic grids. What then? With no paper as back up, and no electricity, the earth may as well stop spinning. This paperless nonsense is absurd. Yes, it may save our precious trees, but most paper companies re-plant where they harvest, and TPTB don’t seem to be thinking about the grave possibility of a future without power, which is very, very real. Scary.
oh, wow! again our thoughts are constantly on the same wave length cj – just this morning i saw a commercial where someone was going through a totally electronically controlled house with a single remote, even turning on the shower – and i’m thinking – now what does that fool think he’s going to do with a power outage!
Speaking of memorable books,has anyone out there read “Nine Kinds of Naked” by Tony Vigorito ?
https://www.amazon.com/Nine-Kinds-Naked-Tony-Vigorito/dp/015603123X/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1320717465&sr=1-1
It’s turning out to be one of the best books I have ever read,so far (I have only read just over 100 of the 400 pages,so I hope the rest of the book holds up).I came across this book synchronisticly and the author claims he wrote the whole book synchronistically.
He writes about how he came to write it here;
https://dropout50394.yuku.com/topic/1253/t/Thoughts-Chaos-Collapse-and-Synchronicity-by-tony-vigorito.html
I’ll let you know what I think about it fully when I get to page 400,but the first 100 were great.
I just wondered if anybody else has read it,and what they thought of it…without giving away the ending,that is.
Haven’t read it! But way back when, he sent us one of his synchros. It’s back in 09 somewhere.
And Gypsy, don’t forget….we can highlight and/or underline our favorite passages, scribble our thoughts in the margins, and go back to read them over and over again, without feeling that we’ve defaced the pages or damaged them, but rather have given ourselves a gift that we can open time and time again!
so true so true, cj – i actually thought of that as i was commenting but failed to add in how i love going back to a book i’ve read a hundred times and re-reading all my handwritten notes in the margins – the underlined and highlighted passages – like visiting old loving friends again but you feel so connected it’s as if you saw each other just yesterday instead of 1o yrs ago – yes – indeed – nothing can take the place of our loving friends!
I love books.
I have only read one full e-book on my Nook: Jane Eyre. The experience was nothing like opening a book and immersing my self in the pages as the story unfolds.
I was just told over the weekend that the college campuses are removing hard com\py books from their libraries. They’re going digital.
Beside containing stories, books have stories-they travel, get borrowed, get lost, are re-found, etc. Electronic books are not the same.
Thanks for sharing your love of books with us, Trish.
and Jane Eyre came loaded on the nook!!
Oh geez, yet another synchronicity! Just this afternoon I saw a commercial on TV for the Kindle, and thought to myself, “No thank you. I like my PAPER books!” And, at the time, my son and I were discussing how social sucrity would become paperless on 12-31-2011. But the icing on the synchro cake: I loved THE THORN BIRDS so much that I purchased the four-video series on VHS the moment it was released, at what was then a whopping $100.00. It was my Christmas gift from hubby that year! I still watch it occasionally on a long rainy day, and it never fails to pull me inside it and I’m THERE. Of all my favorites, THORN BIRDS is absolutely #1. I read the book before they made the TV series, and was astonished at how well the movie presented the story. I don’t believe anything…anything…can ever replace that wonderful musty, clean, unique smell in the old bookstores. They are magnets that draw us like moths to a flame, and reward us with such worlds as only the imagination can produce!!
It’s funny that you mentioned how certain books trigger particular memories,1977, and “The Thorn Birds”.Because I was just thinking along similar lines,but more to do with movies I saw at the cinemas of my childhood,that have long since been closed.One particular movie that has been on my mind most of the year for some reason was a movie that was released in 1977 called “The Last Wave”.It was made by Peter Weir (Dead Poets Society,Witness,etc) and starred Richard Chamberlain (who played the lead character in “The Thorn Birds” TV miniseries,oddly enough) and a bunch of real life tribal Aborigines.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kkpDFheL79E
(the sound quality on the YouTube clip is a little poor,sorry)
It’s also interesting what Peter Weir has to say about making it all those years ago,it echos a lot of what you are saying here about memories.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D_7BYTf95Vc
(to quote the plot from Wikipedia) ;
” The film opens with a montage of scenes of daily life in Australia in the 1970s: a rural school in the desert, the main street of an outback town, a traffic jam in the city, all being affected by unusually adverse weather conditions that suddenly appear. Only the local Aboriginals seem to recognize the cosmological significance of these weather phenomena.
During one of these “freak rainstorms” in Sydney, an altercation occurs among a group of Aboriginals in a pub, which results in the mysterious death of one of them. At the coroner’s inquest, the unexplained death is ruled a homicide and four men are accused of murder. Through the Australian Legal Aid system, a lawyer is procured for their defense. The circumstances by which he was contacted and retained are unusual, in that his law practice is corporate taxation and not criminal. He nonetheless takes on the case, and immediately his professional and personal life begin to unwind.
Plagued by recurring bizarre dreams, the lawyer begins to sense an “otherworldly” connection to one of the accused. He also feels connected to the increasingly strange weather phenomena besetting the city. His dreams intensify along with his obsession with the murder case (which he comes to believe is an Aboriginal tribal killing by curse, in which the victim believed). Learning more about Aboriginal practices and the concept of Dream-time as a parallel world of existence, the lawyer comes to believe the strange weather bodes of a coming apocalypse.
The film climaxes in a confrontation between the lawyer and the tribe’s shaman in a subterranean sacred site beneath the city. Overcoming the shaman, the lawyer escapes to the surface to warn about the Last Wave…”
Worth a look if you can get a copy.I had to buy it from the USA,because I couldn’t find a copy in Australia.I’ve since viewed it for the second time in my life…and loved it.
We loved The Last Wave. Peter Weir is brilliant. I think it’s another movie to netflix for a second viewing. Thanks for the links, Daz. Weird that you couldn’t get it in Australia!
No, that is so typical actually…..sigh.
I bought my first e-book a few weeks back. I find it sad that I can’t pull it out and run my hand through the pages, look up a few recipes without having to take out my tablet and find the place in the book I am looking for. Nope, I like an actual BOOK to have, to share, and to enjoy later.
🙂
oh, i so know exactly what you mean and i feel the same way – exactly – which is why, i’m sure, i’ve not even yet bothered to take my new 9″ “does-everything-tablet thingamajiggy” out of its box and charge it – i mean, the feel of a hard cold metal/plastic something cannot compare in the least to the feel of paper to its smell to its aesthetics – and how in the world will the e-pages of this cold hard tablet ever mellow with age and obtain their own perfect patina and parfum – and the touch – the touch of paper – feeling the paper as i read the words there – running my fingers up and down the lines of print – oh, see – such a complete sensory experience is a book – a real book – and there was/is something so – well, sensual – in the playing of a vinyl record on a real “record player” – taking it out of its jacket in anticipation, giving it a slight whisper to blow off any tiny dust particles – the careful placing of it on the player – then ever so gently taking the needle and waiting till just that perfect groove to place it on the record for the music to begin! and today – well – we all know about the cold little cds of today –
thanks for the trip down memory lane, trish! 😉
Sensuality!
All sorts of things can evoke memories but especially books – oh and old fashioned records. Kindle and the likes will never do this. To touch and hold something stirs the feelings captured when previously handled years before. I can pick up records I still have from my early teens and remember where I bought them, and that feeling of excitement waiting to play them over and over. But as with all things life moves on but books and music have helped make us the people we are today.
Life does move on, but I’m grateful I am old enough to remember real records and books!!
Oh, so true! I feel exactly the same – the books on my shelf are not only stories, they are touchstones into MY Own Story as well. Dreamsnake, which you mention, is one of those touchstones………..I go back to her country again and again. Wonderful to read your associations as well.
Who was it said “The world is not made of atoms – the world is made of stories?”