I once was preoccupied with ensuring that books in my possession remained in my possession. Hardcover classics, trashy paperbacks, biographies, historical monographs, inane fiction (I’m looking at you, Atlas Shrugged), outdated travelogues, law school case books. Couldn’t part with any of them. Clung to my books as if their collective powers would pass to me and transform me by their proximity alone. I rarely borrowed library books because my preference for book ownership defied economic logic. I was not much into sharing, either. I’d rather have loaned you a crisp twenty dollar bill than a coffee-stained paperback rescued from the discount bin at a seedy used book store.
The attraction of book ownership, I suppose, was the solace that came from surrounding myself with all that knowledge and creativity, with knowing that all my favorite books were within my reach, waiting for me faithfully until such time as needed. The exception being those books collected by my wife during her days in graduate school studying sociology. Sorry, Émile Durkheim and Max Weber, you just don’t do it for me. Still, I liked having your gravitas readily available on my bookshelf. You know, just in case.
Lately, though, I’ve reconsidered my selfish ways. Don’t know when it started, precisely. But I would find myself in conversations with friends about books and hear a tiny inner voice urging me to pull a book from my shelf and send it home with my fellow reader. This book gets at exactly what we have been talking about, I would think to myself. It would be great to share this with my friend! Of course, I quickly suppressed those heretical impulses. A book from my shelf? Seriously? What if the unforgivable happened and it wasn't returned? I risked losing a friend and a book. But then one day, I followed my impulse and shared one of my books with a friend.
Guess what? Nothing bad happened. I didn’t miss the book at all. Nor did I miss the one I loaned to a different friend after that. Nor did I miss (too much) the one that never came back and the one that I no longer remember to whom it was loaned (I trust you are in good hands, Eats, Shoots, and Leaves: A Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation -- you will be remembered). What I have learned from the experience is this: Remembering a book does not require the continued tangible availability of the book. The greatness of a book is the ideas it conveys, not its physical presence. And the truth is, a shared book can rekindle the initial joy of discovery each and every time it passes to a new reader. Who knew that generosity could be so rewarding? Open offer to anyone: if you're looking for something by Durkheim or Ayn Rand, hit me up.
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