Blogging and seeking out what should be remembered

In “Shelf Life,” Miriam Burstein responds to D.G. Myers’ “Good books, not new ones” concerning how newspaper book reviews function(ed), and, more importantly to me, how bloggers should. As Myers says (and Burstein quotes), “Perhaps [reviewers] would perform a more essential service to readers if they rescued books that do not deserve to be forgotten.” The last line of Myers’ post is also lovely: “The aim should be to promote reading, not publishing; and to push good books, not new ones.”

I’m reminded of a passage from one of my favorite little-known books, Gabriel Zaid’s So Many Books: Reading and Publishing in an Age of Abundance: “A book lost in the chaos is hopelessly lost. Who will undertake a costly expedition to find and rescue it?” This is part of what I often aim to accomplish, although with what success is left to the imagination of the reader.

More often than not, my posts are about older books that I’ve discovered or re-discovered in some fashion; there are enough exceptions to make The Story’s Story timely, whatever that might mean in the field of fiction.

Still, I’d rather not fall into what Allan Bloom seems to think a compliment in his introduction to Introduction to the Reading of Hegel: Lectures on the Phenomenology of Spirit: “Because he is a serious man, Kojève has never sought to be original, and his originality has consisted in his search for the truth in the thought of wise men of the past.” In that case, call me a frivolous person: neither past nor present is inherently better or more wise, and I don’t deify what Bloom might as well have called “studying old dead guys.”

But rescuing—and what a perfect word that is in the context!—books that have been unjustly forgotten seems a worth task. To me, the moment of greatest delight is still finding that novel, regardless of its age, that so astonishes me that it becomes one of my “go-to” recommendations for friends—and go-to books for when I don’t feel like reading anything else. Some of that list is under the “Top six” link. Most often, when people ask the obvious question “What should I read?” I end up with the same basic cast: The Name of the Rose, Straight Man, The Mind-Body Problem, The Dud Avocado, All the King’s Men, Cryptonomicon, On Love, and a few others I’m no doubt forgetting because when friends ask for recommendations, I try to match the book to the person. That’s obviously not possible in the vast anonymity of online communities, but it’s what I still strive for: the test of a book is not its age, old or new, but its merit. “All that is gold does not glitter, / Not all those who wander are lost; / The old that is strong does no wither, / Deep roots are not reached by the frost.”