Books for boredom...or COVIDS isolation
Among COVID-19’S few benefits has been the uptick in book-reading. Not book-buying so much as book lending among friends. For two years now, our kitchen table has seldom lacked for such. (Luckily, this virus travels poorly on paper.)
Let’s see. Early on last year, a New Brunswick friend sent us Volume 1 of Allan Hudson’s thick history, The Alexanders. Next came Elizabeth Gilbert’s novel,
Eat Pray Love (female wanderlust), plus Tracey Chevalier’s, Girl with a Pearl Earring (about 17th-century Dutch painter Jan Vermeer and his model).
Then it was also, Bernadette Griffin’s, Scenes of Childhood (a PQ memoir). And our own Budge Wilson’s prequel to the Anne of Green Gables series. Next, from another friend came Christopher Isherwood’s, Lions and Shadows (budding writer’s hopes and fears).
Then recently, two hiking buddies left me four more: Richard Powers’, The Overstory (trees, mostly West Coast), Merlin Sheldrake’s, Entangled Life (fungi/algae/lichen pioneers), and Sam Keith’s, One Man’s Wilderness (cabin-building Alaska get-away).
On top of that, a friend bought me Suzanne Simon’s, Finding the Mother Tree (amazing Western tree ecology).
I can’t keep up. Still, thanks to COVID, interesting reads all. Meanwhile, our own bookshelves are gathering dust.
I did manage to re-read H.G. Wells’s 1950s, Outline of History. And my wife must have re-read the entire Anne series plus other titles.
Growing up in outport Newfoundland during the Second World War, I saw few books. Though my parents were well educated for their time, only four books come to mind: a Penguin Home Guard paperback for identifying enemy aircraft, a Buck Rogers spaceship yarn, Chatterbox (a U.K. annual) and, my favourite, The Boys’ Book of Trains and Ships.
At school, we did have a monthly travelling mini-library, but my mother, scared of TB, forbade us to borrow from it. “You never know,” she said, “who’s been coughing on the pages...”
It’s a wonder I took to books at all. For that, I owe our Grade 7 teacher Dan Bragg in Gander Bay. Every Friday afternoon that winter and spring, Mr. Bragg read to us.
The book I most recall was Prester John by John Buchan. I think Buchan’s novel stuck because of the contrast between its South African setting and the white vista of bay ice that filled our windows. He must have read well, for I’ve been hooked on words ever since.
The first book I ever bought with my own money was A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man in 1952 by Irish novelist James Joyce. A Modern Library hardcover, I’d found it at Dicks & Co. in downtown St. John’s.
The title grabbed me because I was starting to paint landscapes and figured the book might help. Imagine my surprise on reading its opening lines:
“Once upon a time and a very good time it was there was a moocow coming down along the road and this moocow that was down along the road met a nicens little boy named baby tuckoo...”
What I’d bought was the novelist’s pioneering 1914 work in which, abandoning standard plot-and-dialogue, Joyce used the new “stream-of-consciousness” technique to explore his young hero’s thoughts, a style he perfected in his 1933 blockbuster Ulysses.
From then on, I bought more modern library books, first Thoreau’s Walden and then whatever took my fancy and which I could afford. You know how it is.
Some books you soak up right away, others you nibble and put aside for later. Of my resulting library, boxed and lugged here and there between moves, some are still not fully read, yet all feel like old friends hard to part with.
Then came COVID. Here then was an excuse not only to re-read, but to lend or give to likewise locked-down, cooped-up souls. Who might likewise treasure and repeat the process.