The Burden of Books

I'm reminded of one of the more humorous aspects of this summer's cross-country bicycling trek when I find myself explaining to people how I managed to end up on the other side of the country with more than a dozen books on my list of "recent acquisitions". Shopping for and (occasionally) purchasing used and (occasionally) new books has always been one of my favorite parts of traveling: Persepolis in Paris, Dracula in Whitby, Whitman in Boston, and so on. Somehow, the experience of movement on my journey becomes wrapped up with my experience of the books I buy along the way, whether I read it immediately or let it marinate on the shelves for a few years. In both cases, I can recall a time and a place--the food, conversation, weather, architecture, and economy, all in some sort of distilled format--and when memory does this kind of work, then the book-as-souvenir or souvenir-as-book becomes for me a wholly different kind of object. It marks out an unexpected aura in my life that continues to remind and challenge me about where I've been and where I'm going.

At any rate, it turns out that even the modest bookstores in Fargo, ND, or Whitefish, MT, have their share of enticing treasures. And even more dangerous for our cargo poundage, we discovered, were the quirky libraries that lie semi-dormant in podunk towns in the middle of farm country. Open at some of the strangest combinations of hours--1:00pm-2:00pm Tuesdays and 3:30-5:00pm Saturdays, for example--these little nests of sharing and learning (and the Internet) were a staple on our journey. Often maintained on a primarily volunteer basis, they were our source of weather reports, route/lodging information, and contact with friends and family. Every other day, we'd take a pit stop around lunch or dinner time, and we probably visited a string of more than 20 of these over the course of our pedaling. The danger here lay in the shelves that often sat near the front doors (or door) of the library, offering all kinds of strange odds and ends, often for less than a dollar! It seems that, in many parts of North Dakota and vicinity, the books with the highest turnover are the kind that I am highly interested in: "classics" of literature, new releases by renowned authors, cookbooks, or pieces of regional interest. Thus, pristine editions of Umberto Eco or Philip Roth for 25 cents show up alongside eccentric young adult fiction about Norwegian immigrants in the Northern Great Plains. In spite of being strapped for cash and storage space, I made a few purchases along the way, mailing back or gifting what I couldn't cram into my panniers. Oh, and then there are also the books I had sent by mail-order to places we were stopping along the way, the ones people gifted to me, or the ones I found lying in boxes along the side of the highway. The only part I'm proud of is that I actually managed to read the majority of these titles:

Hart Crane - The Complete Poems
W.S. Merwin - Selected Poems
Pablo Neruda - The Separate Rose (very nice, dual-language edition by Copper Canyon Press)
William Stafford - The Darkness Around Us Is Deep
Rolf Jacobson - The Roads Have Come To An End Now (again, the excellent Copper Canyon Press)
William Blake - Songs of Innocence and Songs of Experience (finally, an edition with text and images of his original "illuminated" pages)
Perry Miller (Ed.) - The American Transcendentalists: Collected Prose and Poems
Chaucer - The Canterbury Tales

Philip Roth - American Pastoral
Roberto Bolano - The Savage Detectives
Erling Nicolai Rulfsrod - Gopher Tales for Papa
Tom Robbins - Jitterbug Perfume
William Faulkner - The Hamlet
Anton Chekhov - The Major Plays

Elinore Pruitt Stewart - Letters Of A Woman Homesteader
Bill Devall and George Sessions - Deep Ecology: Living As If Nature Mattered
Ken Kern - The Owner-Built Home
Howard Zinn - A People's History of the United States
Aristotle - Nicomachean Ethics

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Okay, I think that must be all of them. Next up: reading after graduation.