'It’s Like a Book, I Think, This Bloomin’ World'

“Books are home. I mean home in the sense of being lost in the reading of them, living within their fictions and intellectual arguments. But even before the actual reading, books are home in the sense that a house isn’t a home unless it’s lined with books.”

 

By this definition I was homeless as a child. I remember a set of the Childcraft Books. Volume 2 was worn and the spine was cracked: “Storytelling and Other Poems.” My mother had old hardbacks without dustjackets of Anthony Adverse, Green Dolphin Street and The Grapes of Wrath, the bestsellers of their day, and my father had a crossword puzzle dictionary. Most reading was confined to magazines and newspapers.  

 

Faith Bottum's column in the May 17 edition of the Wall Street Journal is titled “Houses Without Tomes Aren’t Homes.” I agree but it recalls how often as a newspaper reporter I would visit someone’s home to interview them and see only the absence of books. Sometimes the television remained on while we talked. None of that was part of my story but I would leave feeling a sadness for opportunities lost, curiosity stifled, perhaps lives stunted. Reading is one of the ways we are human and probably what Bottum means by being at home. Hers was unlike mine:

 

“My parents’ house in Hot Springs, S.D., was a ramshackle Victorian, filled with books—maybe 15,000, on every topic I could imagine. Nineteenth-century literature wrapped around the dining room. The guest bedroom got modern poetry. Science fiction crowded the schoolroom, with reference books relegated to the living room and children’s books lining the sun room. Mysteries and 20th-century theology and more were in upstairs bedrooms and hallways.”

 

Sounds idyllic, yes? I feel envious but that, of course, is a waste of time. Starting as a twelve-year-old with a newspaper route, I rectified things and bought my own books (supplemented by frequent library visits). “Do we ever outgrow our childhood’s sense of what a home should be?” Bottum asks. “Maybe, but when it comes to books, I don’t want to.” This week I was reading Kipling again. Here is a stanza from his “Sestina of the Tramp-Royal”:

 

“It’s like a book, I think, this bloomin’ world,  

Which you can read and care for just so long,  

But presently you feel that you will die  

Unless you get the page you’re readin’ done,  

An’ turn another—likely not so good;  

But what you’re after is to turn ’em all.”