'I Skimmed, I Hovered, I Browsed'

A reader tells me his “all-time favorite book” is The Voyage of the Beagle, Darwin’s account of the five years he spent exploring the coast of South America, including the Galápagos, observing animals, plants and geology. Darwin was twenty-one at the start of the voyage. It’s a young man’s book in many ways, written with a sense of wonder, curiosity, enthusiasm and an eye for detail. I tend to read it as a travel book not unlike Patrick Leigh Fermor’s. My reader calls it “a great adventure story” and likens it to Robert Louis Stevenson’s novels and travel books, and I can see that. The first version was published in 1839, twenty years before On the Origin of Species. I suggested to my reader that he try The Malay Archipelago (1869) by Alfred Russel Wallace, Darwin’s contemporary and co-formulator of evolutionary theory. 

I can no longer choose a favorite book. When young I would have said Ulysses, a novel I annotated and brooded over for years, but that was in part braggadocio. Today, when I think of a likely favorite, a dozen alternative titles instantly nominate themselves. I’m always moved by stories of the impact a book has had on the lives of readers. Think of Eric Hoffer, a migrant worker during the Great Depression, discovering Montaigne’s Essays.

Of course, there’s peril in being a strict one-book reader, whether the book in question is the Bible, Das Kapital or a title by Carlos Castañeda (remember him?). In his first memoir, A Cab at the Door (1968), V.S. Pritchett describes his Uncle Arthur who learned to read as an adult using Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy. It became his secular Bible. Pritchett concludes: “In short, Uncle Arthur was a crank.”

 

On the day my reader told me about his love of Darwin I happened on a list of books recommended by the late Dr. Oliver Sacks. Those familiar with the neurologist and his work will find few surprises. Glad to see David Hume, William James, Auden, Thom Gunn, Nabokov and The Voyage of the Beagle.

 

The only shocking title on Sacks’ list is the sentimental dreck of Steinbeck’s Cannery Row. Many of the science and medicine books are popular rather than academic or strictly scholarly, and sound interesting. In his memoir, Uncle Tungsten: Memories of a Chemical Boyhood (2001), Sacks writes of his early years in London:

 

“The Willesden Public Library was an odd triangular building set at an angle to Willesden Lane, a short walk from our house. It was deceptively small outside, but vast inside, with dozens of alcoves and bays full of books, more books than I had ever seen in my life. Once the librarian was assured I could handle the books and use the card index, she gave me the run of the library and allowed me to order books from the central library and even sometimes to take rare books out. My reading was voracious but unsystematic: I skimmed, I hovered, I browsed, as I wished . . .”