Show down: bookstore vs. library

bookstore

There is a bookstore in Nairobi that has quite an impressive collection (relatively) of fiction, and I have spent the past 3 months buying the last 3 books of the Endymion series by Dan Simmons. This past month I walked in, went straight to the wall with the science fiction type books, grabbed The Rise of Endymion, went to the counter, paid, and left.

It was good! A satisfying end to a satisfying series, and even pulled off the Messiah theme. So that went well. (incidentally, the first book is the most different in style of the 4, so if you aren’t captivated by the start, I still recommend reading it and then checking out the second book and seeing if that is more like it.)

library

The National Public Library is actually not small. It is certainly bigger than my hometown library in Scottdale, though not as a big as the Goshen public library. As with all libraries, the good books are mixed in with books that were written and published and then quickly forgotten – by anyone so unfortunate as to read them and probably by their authors themselves.

My estimation is that Kenya’s national library has a lot more of the forgettable books. A lot more. Religious fiction that didn’t find an audience abroad and so were donated by well-meaning English missionaries; polemic fiction donated by the Soviet Union during the fight for Africa’s loyalty in the Cold War; authors from abroad who fictionalize their accounts of Kenya and then generously give 10 copies to the national library; obsolete science textbooks; the Left Behind series; and countless books in a slow state of decay that have been re-covered, thus with no title on the outside, so that one has to take the book off the shelf and open the book to discover whether it is perhaps an unread Dorothy L. Sayers novel or whether, yet again, it is Nurse Jane’s First Job or John Goes to School, penned in the 1940s or 1950s by someone with an Urge to Educate and Morally Instruct.

I go to the library every one or two weeks during my lunch hour. One is only allowed to have 2 books checked out at a time, which is probably all for the best, considering my track record in returning library books on time. I always tell myself that I will spend less than 10 minutes finding a new book, and I always take at least 30 minutes. I have to establish if any new books have been added; check a few more of the many un-titled books for hidden treasures; consider whether I want to finally read the Rabbit books (Rabbit Run, Rabbit Redux, etc etc – I never have and am starting to doubt that I ever will); decide to give in and check out on the Everyman’s Library books that were donated by the British Council; change my mind (I don’t really want to read Robinson Crusoe today); in a fit of desperation consider checking out one of the German novels that are mixed in with the others (only once have I followed through on this – Kinder von Eden, a translation from what was clearly a not-very-good American novel. I skimmed through it, and I’ll say any German book that I can actually understand most of cannot be a good book); try and fail to find something I want to read in the mixed up section of poetry, drama, literary theory and, inexplicably, more of the Left Behind series; wander over to the children’s section and see if anything readable is over there (I have re-read some nice Roald Dahl that way); stare at the E.W. women authors - Edith Wharton, Evelyn Waugh, Eudora Welty - and try to remember the differences between them in order to determine which one I would actually like; give up on the E.W.’s, check in both the W and the S sections to see if there is any more Wole Soyinka; check if there is now more than the one Ursula LeGuin book (no) or the one Kazuo Ishiguro (no) or the one Michael Odaatje (no); finally settle on either 1) rereading a good book, 2) trying out an old classic that I never read, 3) taking an African novel in the hopes that I can manage to read the whole book without having to stop because of getting overly upset or overwhelmed, or 4) grabbing a book with a brightly colored cover, which at least means it was written, published, and donated in the past decade.

Recently, I went through that whole process and ultimately walked out with two books: Gulliver’s Travels and In Search of Lost Time (also known in its previous translation as In Remembrance of Times Past or something like that).

I sat down one night and read the first section of Gulliver’s Travels, where he visits the Lilliputians – the tiny folk. I think the next section is where he visits the big folk, and then after that I’m a bit vague – I know he visits a land of horses, and a land of stupid humans, I think. I think it’s a political satire…or commentary…or something. It’s funnier than I anticipated, although it does live up to my expectations in that now that I have put it down, I’m reluctant to pick it back up.

In Search of Lost Time is…amazing. I can’t believe I didn’t read any Proust my whole life – somehow I had the idea it was completely inaccessible and unreadable. Sort of like how I keep thinking I’ll like Ulysses, and then I can’t get more than 50 pages into it at which point I realize that I have completely no clue what is going on or who the characters are or what the book is even about (not to blame Ulysses. I recognize that it is a book of genius, i.e. way on out there beyond me). But Proust isn’t like that at all. It’s just beautiful and insightful. Hooray!

bookstore vs library

I’ve got to go with the library.

I am naturally thrifty, nevermind the fact that I am an MCC volunteer right now. And I am also naturally a risk-averse person, so going to the library frees me from the usual risks and benefits that I weigh whenever I hold a bookstore book in my hands. Will the experience of reading it be worth the cost, or will it be squandered money? (Would I have bought Proust? Even second-hand? No.)

But the freedom that I feel in a library goes beyond not being weighed down by financial consequences. When I’m in a library, I feel like the boundaries of my horizon have been pushed back. I am with others and any one of us could at any moment be plunged into greatness. And why? Because we all, as a society, have decided to support each other in this thing. We have decided that we value words, and that they and the knowledge they impart should be accessible to all. Isn’t that beautiful?

(But I’m still glad there are bookstores, especially used ones)