It’s always fascinating to see how you turn up in someone else’s writing. And by “fascinating,” I mean distressing. As a dramatist, I’m entitled to the truth as I create it, and other people’s views (particularly of stories involving me) just get in the way of that. Here’s a case in point.

Remember my good friend Doug, of “Doug’s Reading List“? Yesterday, a year and a half after the creation of The Reading List, and six weeks after my posting it here, he sent a broadcast email with his version of how the list came to be created:

Back when we were planning to go out via sailboat, I asked a well read friend of ours, Lee Wochner, to give me a list of his “take to the desert island” books. I expected him to spend a few minutes banging out his top-of-the-head top ten list and leave it at that. But to Lee, books are the essential currency of our humanness, the primary record of our civilization and any personal list of favorites to be the ultimate opening of the kimono – the baring of the ultimate soul – the absolute and total revelation of who you are as a person.

Most people today would feel that way about recommending their top 10 rental DVDs or best episodes of Friends or favorite American Idol competitor. Books, and reading, have slid from their place of honor in American culture, as a quick glance at literacy rates and market share & revenue numbers for publishers & newspapers will reveal.

I used to feel just as strongly about books as Lee does. Everywhere I ever lived I dragged every book around I’d ever owned, except for the complete collection of original 1st edition Ian Fleming James Bond paperbacks I’d received from my uncle Doug and loaned to Jay Buckles in 1974 and never got back and my large format anniversary edition Harold Head comic book that disappeared into Dan Norenberg’s Oldsmobile Vista Cruiser station wagon in 1976 and never returned. Not that I’m resentful and have a hard time letting go or anything.

My woodworking project in high school was a bookshelf. I dragged that around too, and showcased prized books in feature locations around my room, and later, houses. Although many things you wore, watched or discussed reflected who you were, I always believed that nothing told your story like your books. Whenever I visited someone who was a reader, who had books around their place, I always took a long, lingering trip to the bathroom and spent as much time as possible scanning their shelves to a) see if I recognized anything I’d read that validated my existence and provided a connection and b) see what I hadn’t read that defined my gaps and the differences between us.

My first big purge of books was when we moved to California. I sold the bottom layers of my library at our garage sale in Hudson, WI. I had them all laid out on our cargo trailer, which they filled mostly two deep, spines up. After the sale I pulled the trailer down to our used book store in town to sell a few of the remainder to the owner, then took the rest to the local retirement home and hospital for their libraries. It was a traumatic experience. I haven’t forgotten that either, and have spent the intervening six and half years fine tuning a long, complex and very tenuous logic chain that makes my wife entirely responsible. Not that I hold on to things like that or anything.

When I told Lee about the garage sale his expression clouded and he looked at me like a traitor to the cause of literacy and higher thought. The sale, the abandonment of books – the very thought of it – visibly turned his stomach. I would have had the same reaction not two weeks before I’d done it.

The next big purge was when we dispersed our worldly possessions in preparation for this upcoming travel. I sold some more at our garage sale, but donated most of them. I gave my dozens of sailing books to Jimmy Sones, a friend who also nurtures a dream of one day sailing over the horizon. The rest that I really treasured I put in a cargo trailer and drove out to my son, Adam, also a reader, in Minnesota. He put them on the bookshelves that I gave him, which were made by his grandfather as his high school woodworking project back in the early 50s. My dad’s shelves were much better made than mine, and of the two (mine went a long, long time ago), I’m glad I kept his around for such a suitable family heirloom moment.

So, at this point, I am essentially bookless. Aside from a few wilderness medicine books, survival manuals and some guidebooks, I have only a handful, most written by friends.

This is a very strange place to be for a kid who read, on average, at least four books a week for most of my childhood.

So, I need your help. I need your “take to the desert island” list of books so I can stock up for these travels.

When I asked Lee for his list he ended up spending over nine hours on it (see it here: Doug’s Book List ), which I guess is about what I would have invested if someone would have asked me this question prior to the Great Book Purge.

You, on the other hand, do not need to invest that much time or energy.

The expedition vehicle we ended up with is not a 53’, 35,000 lb. cruising sailboat. It isn’t all that big and is already at the limit on weight. Consequently, we don’t have a lot of capacity for me to drag along books. So, your list can, and needs to be, short.

If you could only take a backpack full, what books would you take to a desert island?

Be well,
Doug
—————————————-
Douglas Hackney
dhackney@egltd.com
www.hackneys.com/travel

(You’ll note that I have helpfully included Doug’s email address and website should you wish to draft your own Doug’s Reading List and send it. To him.)

As I’ve written here before, I’m glad to call Doug a friend. He’s a smart person who repeatedly puts his energies into helping the world, usually in a direct fashion, one person at a time, whether it’s clearing debris post-Katrina, donating books to a burned-out store in San Diego, or gifting tools to a would-be motorcycle mechanic in India. I admire Doug. Doug is good people. Which is why it saddens me all the more to see how memory loss is afflicting him at such an early age.

In Doug’s version, Doug tells a tear-stained Lee that the imminent sailboat departure of he and his wife affords the retention or acquisition of no more than 10 books. Lee cannot imagine the world reduced to a mere 10 books and with a darkened brow associates Doug with the “Friends” culture. From “Anna Karenina” to “Friends” to… WWF rebroadcasts on a 2″ iPod screen… it’s a downward voyage, led by Doug’s divestiture of his library. Doug isn’t on a heroic quest, but a fool’s odyssey — one Lee succumbs to joining.

Here’s Lee’s version:

Doug bemoans to me his lack of a degree in literature (completely understandable — the bemoaning part) and asks if there might possibly somehow be some way that I could provide him with a primer — a list of bare essentials that will allow him to escape cocktail-party chatter with only minor stabbings from cocktail toothpicks and in the meantime enlighten him in the non-Biblical literary underpinnings of Western civilization. What we’re looking for here is work that is both relevant and popular in such circles, or which will enable Doug to steer the conversation back to safer shores. (Which provided the reasoning behind my “Hold your own at a dinner party” sub-list, “i.e., the 11 most-discussed, most-influential works of modernist literature at this time; impress your friends, astound your enemies. Comprehensive? By no means. Will these 11 provide enough artillery to cover your weaknesses? Absolutely,” and why the list features Kafka, Beckett, Camus, Sylvia Plath, et al.)

These two origin stories differ greatly, as you see.

In the comics, it has always irritated me when origin stories are recooked. Supergirl goes from being Superman’s cousin as well as the only other Kryptonian to escape the planet’s destruction to being either a shapeshifting protoplasm or a human being with the same Earth name as Supergirl but now infected by the protoplasm, back to being Superman’s cousin but from another dimension, and so forth. I can’t follow it and I don’t like it. (I don’t think it’s a coincidence that I read none of these related comic books.) Iconic characters and iconic stories are iconic for good reason: The original version carries a deeper truth, one that tells us something about ourselves. Who was the alien Superman, after all, but a Jew, sired by Jews, newly Americanized, someone who had escaped the destruction of his own planet and was now eager to represent his new nation in the battle against Hitler and the forces of genocide and oppression? To suddenly, if briefly, recast him as a cyborg, as DC Comics did in the 1990’s, is lunacy. Forces of reasonable goodness still merit representation; cyborgs deserve nothing.

I feel similarly about the two origin stories now competing for primacy with regard to “Doug’s Reading List.”

In Doug’s version, he can transport only so many books, so he needs a desert-island reading list. We’ve all seen that story. In fact, we’ve heard that story as well, as with radio programs like “Desert Island Discs.” It doesn’t take us very far. It’s about economy of scale, and that is a story lost on a nation of strivers and dreamers.

In my version, Doug is seeking the wisdom of the ages and turns to me for guidance. (This version clarifies why the endeavor is worth nine hours of my time.) Doug is much like the Indian motorcycle repairman who only needs the tools. I draft the list, provide options oriented around Doug’s own goals (“desert island” is there, as well as “succeed at cocktail party,” and further reading choices), as well as a point-by-point explanation of why some titles were chosen while others left off. Ideally, Doug adopts the list and, armed with newfound insights gleaned from this reading, transcends the material to lend new perspectives on what he’s read and on what surrounds him in our world.

To me, that is an American story, and in the six years I’ve known Doug I’ve come to associate him with what we think of as American ideals: mid-Western, commonsensical, hardworking, successful, generous, populist, honest. He may believe that his story of the list is correct — it may even be correct — but it’s not right. It’s not right for Doug, and it’s not right for America.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, January 16th, 2007 at 4:30 pm and is filed under On reading, Thoughts, Writing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.