Books

As I have been unpacking books today I have been thinking of where I got each book, what I was doing at the time, why I bought it, what the book was about, and so on.

The Camera was the first book of the Life Library of Photography series, a series I started to buy and read while I was in Greenland in 1973.  I had just bought my first camera, a Minolta SRT 101 single lens reflex camera, a simple workhorse camera which brought me so much enjoyment hiking and photographing the barren landscape.
The book describes a dated technology but an ageless aesthetic.

Soon after I finished my tour in Greenland and returned to the US I started buying the Hundred Greatest Books from the Franklin Library.  Moby Dick was the first of the series, and each month a new leather bound book would arrive, and each month I would hold it, smell it, rub it - everything but read it.  That’s not entirely true; I did read some of them, like Crime and Punishment, but others, such as Euripides Plays, I just couldn’t get into.

The fall before I went to Nigeria in 1977 I read Return to Laughter, an anthropological novel by Eleanor Smith Bowen, a fictional retelling of the author’s experiences living and working with the Tiv in Nigeria, the same tribe my wife and I would be working with a few months later.  My copy of the book, a tape wrapped paperback that sold for $2.50, is well worn and earmarked, evidence of being read multiple times.  More than anything else this book prepared me for the shock of moving into an entirely different culture.

Once I was living in Nigeria I started looking for books that would help me understand the people there.  My copy of Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe is also held together by clear tape, but that old copy means a lot more to me than a brand new book would.  Achebe was a great writer (he died recently) and this book started to open the door for me, to see the Nigerian culture from their side, to begin to start to comprehend the complexity of their society.

Another book that brings back memories is a cheap hard bound copy of The Life of Lenin by Maria Prilezhayeva, published in Moscow, and sold for 65 Kopeks.  I obtained my copy while living in Almaty, Kazakhstan.  The book is all propaganda, all about Lenin’s heroic struggles and the joys of communism, and as such is an interesting example of the way things were before the Soviet Union broke up.

I read my copy of The Plague by Albert Camus shortly after caring for a young man with bubonic and pneumonic plague in Gallup, NM, and the actions and emotions that he describes so well could still be seen at the Gallup Indian Medical Center - the panic, the denials, the pragmatism.

These book, and many more, tell the story of my life; much better than I could ever tell it.