a world of paper.

I've been trying to find my way back into books lately, into reading as a reader does, and not just any reader but the kind of reader I was as a shy adolescent who much preferred to spend her Saturday afternoons tucked away in the Hawaii State Library, devouring fiction and mythology and borrowing more books than I could nearly carry to the car when my mom came to get me at closing. As a child, one of my life ambitions was to become a librarian; to arrive at this, I thought one simply read and bought and collected a vast amount of books and then "opened" a library, though I moved on with relative ease to other dreams once someone set me straight.

In the past few months, I've been nearing that same passion. I've read between deadlines, in the morning, in the afternoon, at 3am while I wait for Dave to come home from work. I've read whenever I could, sometimes even when I couldn't (or perhaps shouldn't have). I started with brain candy: the large pile of trashy novels my wife sent me as "research" for our own co-written trashy-romance-in-progress. Then I've started to handle back issues of the New Yorker in single sittings. Then I turned to my other magazine subscriptions (San Francisco, Real Simple) and other random magazines I had laying around (7x7, Intermezzo, Hana Hou!, and, yes of course, People and Us Weekly, these last two being a no-brainer since Angelina recently adopted again and I'm obsessed with her). Then, finally, I brought myself around to more respectable "literature" (stuff you'd be proud instead of embarassed to be caught reading on the nyc subway).

The Burlingame library is but a block from my apartment, and on a few lazy afternoons I've much relished the walk there and back, the California sun shining like it's supposed to in this suburb, willowy branches of unidentifiable trees moved by breeze, and so forth. The Burlingame branch is pretty fantastic itself: its architecture (which according to its website is "Spanish" and "lovingly restored"), its size (generous for a small suburb), and its third floor fiction **kingdom**, in which I've lost a few half hours. On the first floor, they also have a new releases room, arranged by genre (fiction, nonfiction, mystery, romance, et cetera) and then alpha by author's last name. I've always gone in with a specific grocery list (if you will) of books I've been meaning to read; that works variously, depending on if I go directly to the third floor (well) or allow myself to be drawn towards the new books (not-so-well). For example, I went in about ten days ago, having read an e-mail from my beloved former fiction teacher, Susan Thames, indicating that she'd probably not be able to make the wedding next month, and I was so overcome with missing her I needed to borrow a book by her and reimerse myself in Susanness. So, in I went, and borrowed I'll Be Home Late Tonight. I had also been meaning to read Paul Auster, because of various reviews I'd read of him, because he writes about New York and I've been feeling homesick lately, and because another book I'd read recently--Breakable You, by another SLC teacher, Brian Morton--had dropped his name ("Paul Aster makes me wet" was the quite memorable quote). Well, I walked out with Susan's book; four books by Paul Auster; Ray Bradbury's Farewell Summer, the sequel to Dandelion Wine; and a very curious little volume called The House of Paper, written by a Carlos Maria Dominquez, of whom I'd never heard.

... And I was completely bowled over by the slender volume. With my bookish past, I'd often wondered about how books can shape a life, save a life, and change a person. I've thought of key moments in my own life, where I was sure that if only another person had read a certain book we'd better understand each other. I recall how heart-heavy the parent-child relationship in A Feather on the Breath of God made me feel, the way The Time Traveller's Wife had made me wish Dave read because of how much I wanted to share the love of those two characters with him, the brief window Why She Left Us provided into the lives of my grandparents' generation spent in the WWII internment camps, When the Shark Bites, the most sharp and true book I've ever read set in Hawaii, and how the romance A Kiss Remembered makes sure I never forget my high school crush on my journalism teacher (just typing those words and thinking his name makes my breath catch, still, just a bit). I think particularly of trying to use Amy Bloom to explain why I had been unfaithful in a relationship, which now to me seems incredibly insipid and cruel, but which in the moment I had sincerely hoped would assuage the pain we were both feeling. Four words, most beloved of books: Jane Eyre, Mrs. Dalloway. And don't leave out the literary slink and hijinks of Tom Robbins. I think of how Cloud Atlas revolutionized my idea of what was possible in the architecture of a novel. Grace Paley, Michael Cunningham, Victoria Redel, Zora Neale Hurston, Salinger, Garcia-Marquez, Allende, Saramago... the list goes on. I can recall who gave me certain books and will always associate one with the other, what was going on for me the first time I read others, and which books I turn to again and again--for pleasure, for guidance, for solace. It also fascinates me how arbitarily we come upon books. A summer reading list for a class you end up dropping, an endnote in one book, a literary reference ("Paul Auster makes me wet") in another, in addition to the more standard recommendations from teachers, friends, Oprah, and so forth. But I always fancied myself somewhat strange and probably alone in such a personal and visceral relationship with books.

But The House of Paper is a book about books. It's a book about people's relationships with books, and people's relationships with other people and those other people's books. It's about Cambridge and Argentina and Uruguay and sand and impermanence and the way that life is often stranger than fiction. That a woman should die, as predicted, hit by a car while reading Emily Dickinson in retrospect makes me trying to explain my own divided heart with Bloom's "love is not a pie" seem somehow--at least to me--less trite.

I sat down to write tonight about The House of Paper and my crazed love of books and find myself writing more and more about love in general. For example, in The House of Paper, one character's love for books so overtakes his life that he ends up with over 20,000 books, and his desire to hold onto each and every one, in his mind as well as his physical collection, leads to him condemning the whole collection to a certain permanence: He has them laid as bricks in concrete, cementing the vast array into his life. Basically, he loved them so dear, he would stop at nothing to keep them forever, even at the risk of betraying their original state, in which so much more was possible--multiple interpretations of the text, appreciating the art of the books themselves, their binding, their covers, and the subtext many used volumes carry in tender inscriptions to unknown people, strange and barely decipherable handscrawled notes in margins, and so forth. Here, the discussion begs for some truly awful aphorism like "love it like a butterfly"--let it go and it will alight back upon you or some shit--but I wish I didn't have to stoop so low. Nevertheless, it's been said and I'll move on quickly. This should mean I'll be more zen and lend out books without sticking little post-it notes in my planner noting when and to whom I lent each and every volume ... but why lie? I won't stop now. And my next order of business? Onward and upwards, building my vast "library" with the addition of The House of Paper courtesy of amazon.com.