'Why Not Get Out of This Rut?'

"Books offer what may be called a standing solution to the eternal and infernal Christmas-present problem.” 

Well, yes and no. I’m a graceless gift giver and receiver, especially when it comes to books. People like my middle son are inspired and have a knack for choosing appropriate gifts. He reliably picks titles previously unknown to me that prove readable. Examples from recent years include The Yom Kippur War by Abraham Rabinovich and The Walls of Israel by Jean Lartéguy. Some friends and relatives assume that because I’m a reader, choosing the perfect title is a cinch. It’s not. I’m neurotically specific when it comes to the books I want. You’re not likely to find something at Barnes & Noble I might actually want to read or else I already have it.

 

In the passage quoted at the top, H.L. Mencken oversimplifies things. He’s writing in his Baltimore Evening Sun column for December 20, 1910. His examples suggest how radically times and tastes have changed in a mere 114 years:

 

“The same old books are bought and given year after year. Go into the bookstores and you will see huge pyramids of the novels of Bulwer-Lytton, the tales of Edgar Allan Poe, Fitzgerald’s Omar (in a score of gaudy and painful bindings), the poems of Alfred Lord Tennyson, Motley’s ‘Rise of the Dutch Republic,’ Fenimore Cooper’s atrocious romances, the essays of Emerson, cheap reprints of Kipling’s earlier and uncopyrighted stories, Shakespeare in trashy near-leather, Wilkie Collins, Eugene Sue, Victor Hugo, De Maupassant, Dumas Pere, Sienkiewicz and Charles Garvice—stupid and silly ‘gift’ books innumerable.”

 

Still true but not a single title or author cited by Mencken will you find under this year’s Christmas trees with the possible exception of the unreadable Poe (“We are cured of Poe by 18”). That’s good news, except we’ve substituted our own predictable catalog of bestsellers and default “classics.”

 

“Such stuff,” Mencken writes, “is bought by the wagon load every Christmas. Very little of it, I fancy, is ever read. What civilized human being, in this year of grace 1910, actually enjoys Bulwer-Lytton?” I’ve never read him and like most of you I know only the much-parodied opening line from his 1830 novel Pierre: “It was a dark and stormy night . . .”

“Why not get out of this rut?” Mencken asks. “Why not break away from the hideous ‘presentation’ books, the ghastly ‘sets’ of soporific novels, the dull poetry, the childish books of travel, the plush-and-onyx editions de luxe which burden the book counters at this season?”

 

Amidst all the dreck, Mencken does suggest good stuff as well, including Laurence Sterne’s A Sentimental Journey Through France and Italy and titles by Henry James, Joseph Conrad and Rudyard Kipling.