The Joys and Despairs of Reading

A few fun recent articles from the LA Times:

Nicholas Brisbanes unearths an attempt to make books available to the Iraqis living near Camp Anaconda (a.k.a. Mortaritaville). Some of the same former soldiers (now in their 80s) who brought libraries back to Germany after World War II are behind the 10,000 volumes that recently arrived in Iraq. Brisbanes arrived to write about it

on one condition. Would the Army help me visit Ur, the Sumerian city in lower Mesopotamia where the Old Testament tells us the prophet Abraham was born, where writing as we know it began to take shape about 5,000 years ago, where humanity's first literary text, the "Epic of Gilgamesh," may have been composed, and where some of the world's first libraries were located? Yes, came the answer.

Books may not be the top priority for either soldier or civilian in Iraq today, but at the same time, I am pleased to read that even in the military, there are people who recognize that reading is important, that books make a difference.

Since we enjoyed her so much last year, I'll be seeing Jane Smiley on a panel at next weekend's Festival of Books at UCLA. So it was a pleasant surprise when halfway through this review, I discovered that the reviewer was none other than Smiley.

Most readers would agree that there are plenty of books. After you've read all the great ones once or twice, you can begin on the semi-great ones or the mere fluff, and you can spend several lifetimes doing it. But in "The Book of Lost Books: An Incomplete History of All the Great Books You Will Never Read," Stuart Kelly reminds us that the glass of books is half empty rather than brimming full. Not only are we missing the second part of Dickens' "The Mystery of Edwin Drood" but also the whole second volume of "The Brothers Karamazov," the entirety of Herman Melville's proposed collaboration with Nathaniel Hawthorne, titled "Agatha," and 73 of Aeschylus' 80 plays.
[snip]
Personally, after reading "The Book of Lost Books," I began to wonder: If I had to pick one or two of my own books to be preserved, which ones would they be? Would I claim the serious works, as Algernon Charles Swinburne did, and risk coming to seem, like him, overwrought and overwritten, even though the record of his life shows considerable traces of a satiric, irreverent and playful gift? Or would I preserve the funny efforts, knowing that humor is perhaps the most time-bound and ephemeral form of all? What if all the books were lost and only that screenplay was left, the one I wrote for television that was entirely rewritten by the producers before it aired under my name?

Smiley has excellent credentials for such a review - she spent years after 9/11 in a philosophical exploration of the novel while dealing with a disaster-related, writer's block existential crisis. (Or this was how I understood it from her words last year - I may be overstating the case.)

Anyway, yet another reminder of book and libraries, and the roles they play in our lives...