Sløtface – "New Year, New Me" (2020)

I keep holding

Books I’ll never read

As you can see from the screenshot below, I currently have 44 items checked out from my public library – ranging in length from the 126 large-fonted and generously-spaced pages  of Susan Sontag’s book about war, Regarding the Pain of Others, to the mind-boggling 1402 fine-print pages of an unabridged edition of James Boswell’s Life of Johnson.

Those numbers somewhat overstate the quantity of reading material that I’m hoarding.  For example, I’ve checked out several children’s books to read to my grandkids when they visit, plus I have a few DVDs of movies that aren’t currently available on Netflix.  

Also, there’s some duplication among my checkouts.  When I’m trying to get my hands on a new book, I will usually put a hold on its Kindle version and large-print edition as well as reserving the regular print edition of the book.  On occasion two or all three versions of the same book become available at the same time. 

So my 44 checked-out items represent about three dozen different adult titles.

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Is there any chance that I will actually read all three dozen of these books?

Of course not.  I freely admit that even though it is now possible to hold on to them almost indefinitely.

The nominal time you are allowed to hold on a printed library book in my county is three weeks, but it is possible to renew a checkout up to ten times.  And our library has stopped levying late fines since covid-19 reared its ugly head – so there’s no real force behind return dates. 

By the way, e-books are supposed to disappear automatically from my Kindle on the due date.  But I’ve learned that I can hold on to a Kindle book indefinitely if I put it into “airplane” mode after downloading the book – scheduled deletions take place via the internet, and they can’t happen if you never connect your device to the internet.  (Which is why the screenshot above indicates that I have zero checkouts on my Kindle – the library thinks all those books have been returned, but I outsmarted them!)

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Given that I almost certainly will not read that 1402-page unabridged Life of Johnson, why did I check it out?  Not to mention four Wallace Stegner novels (plus some works of nonfiction by that author), and Evelyn Waugh’s Sword of Honor trilogy, and Susan Sontag’s essays, and Louis Menand’s weighty The Metaphysical Club: A Story of Ideas in America?  (Just typing the title of that last book makes me want to take a nap.)

There’s something abnormal about my behavior.  Having so many library books at once is clearly a form of hoarding, and must be the result of some deep-seated psychological need.

I suspect it has something to do with my growing up in an environment of scarcity.  My family was not poor by any means – I never missed a meal, or was without suitable clothing and shoes – but my grew-up-in-the-Depression parents were extremely frugal, and were reluctant to spend money on anything other than the necessities of life . . . which certainly didn’t include books.

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The late Larry McMurtry wrote several dozen books (including Terms of Endearment and Lonesome Dove) during his lifetime but enjoyed reading more than writing.  He became a very successful used and rare book dealer – at one time his inventory consisted of some 400,000 volumes.  More importantly for my purposes, he had a personal collection of 20,000 books in his home.

Larry McMurtry

When McMurtry was in his seventies, he wrote three short autobiographical books – Books (about his career as a rare book dealer), Literary Life (about his career as a prolific novelist and nonfiction author), and Hollywood (about the many film adaptations of his books and the many screenplays he wrote).  

In the course of his life, McMurtry read an astonishing number of books, and he mentions quite a few of them in his memoirs.  Most of the dozens of library books sitting in my home or residing digitally on my Kindle are books that McMurtry endorsed – not only the writings of Stegner, Sontag, and Waugh mentioned above but also the novels and short stories of John Barth, Robert Coover, and Thomas Pynchon (all of whom I was infatuated with when I was an English major at Rice).

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McMurtry grew up in a tiny Texas town, miles away from the nearest bookstore, but he never bothered getting a library card:

I didn’t want books I had to bring back.  I wanted books to keep, books that I could consider . . . before I read them.  My approach to books was slow – I might seize them quickly but wait awhile to read them.  War and Peace, for example . . . . I kept it around, looked at it, puzzled over the names, dipped in here and there, a process that went on for perhaps a year before I sat down and read the book.

From the first I was attracted to the look and feel of books – I liked to enter . . . the aura of reading, which involved mental preparation and was a way, I guess, of savoring the experience ahead.  This time of anticipation is one of the pleasures of having a personal library.

I understand how McMurtry felt.  For example, I bought the four-volume Collected Essays, Journalism, and Letters of George Orwell years ago.  I love Orwell, and I love seeing those four volumes on my bookshelf – even though I’ve never torn open the cellophane wrapper that set of books came in, much less read them:

But I became a denizen of my local public library at a very young age.  My hometown didn’t have a real bookstore, so I got in the habit of getting books from the library rather than buying them.  

That habit has persisted until today.  I’ve bought a lot of records in my day – libraries never had much in the way of rock albums – but own relatively few books.  When a book is easily available from the public library, why buy it?

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I’ve written a lot about Larry McMurtry since his death in March, and I’m probably not done with him yet.

McMurtry went to the same college I attended – Rice University in Houston – and he taught creative writing at Rice my freshman year.  I was very aware of McMurtry because the movie adaptation of his book, The Last Picture Show, was released to widespread acclaim when I was at Rice.  

But I never met McMurtry.  While I took creative writing as a senior, I was more occupied with basic classes my freshman year.  And it would never have occurred to me to drop by his office for a chat.

By the time I graduated from law school and moved to Washington, DC, McMurtry had opened a used and rare bookstore called “Booked Up” there.  I passed by his bookstore a number of times, but never went in and struck up a conversation with him.  That would have seemed like bad form to me – akin to seeing a famous athlete or musician at a restaurant and interrupting his dinner to ask him to pose for a selfie with me.

Now that McMurtry’s dead, I have to let go of the fantasy I had about meeting him some day, talking to him about books and movies, and learning that we shared so many opinions that we became friends.  

I have a lot of other fantasies.  Most of them involve women who aren’t dead, but might as well be for purposes of those fantasies.

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Sløtface is a Norwegian band that formed in 2012.  According to Billboard, their music has “won praise from the blogosphere and tastemaker music press for their brash mix of nagging pop hooks and garage punk aesthetic.” 

Sløtface used to call itself Slutface but changed their name in hopes of avoiding what they have called “social media censorship.”

Sløtface

“We have in no way changed our political and feminist message,” the group said when they adopted the new moniker in 2016.  “We just hope to reach more people with our lyrics and message by changing one silly letter of our name and thereby avoiding censorship.”

I don’t know about that, but I do know that I couldn’t pass up a song that had lyrics that were so perfectly suited for this post.  

Click here to listen to “New Year, New Me,” which was released on the band’s 2020 album, Sorry for the Late Reply.

Click on the link below to buy the record from Amazon: