November 2016.
Browsings
by Michael Dirda
(New York: Pegasus, 2015)
If only I had flair for striking similes and metaphors! Alas, nothing ever reminds me of anything else.
Page 6.
Beauty, I learned, grows out of nouns and verbs, and personal style derives from close attention to diction and sentence rhythm.
Page 6.
A writer’s greatest challenge … though, is tone. I like a piece to sound as if it were dashed off in 15 minutes - even when hour might have been spent in contriving just the right degree of airiness and nonchalance.
Page 7.
Why is it that I so seldom want to read what everyone else wants to read?
Page 9.
I fear that my decreasing interest in the contemporary indicates the onset of old age, or even old fogeyism.
Page 9.
Fiction is a house with many stately mansions, but also one in which it is wise, at least sometimes, to swing from the chandeliers.
Page 11.
Poets traditionally own cats.
Page 13.
While Beatrix Potter’s little albums are all about animals - especially naughty ones, like Peter Rabbit and Squirrel Nutkin - her woodland characters aren’t really pets. They’re children in disguise.
Pages 15-16.
We don’t’ read for high-minded reasons. We read for aesthetic, emotional, and intellectual excitement.
Page 22.
Writers ... often grow obsessive about their tools.
Page 27.
Many people simply read fiction for pleasure and nonfiction for information. I often do myself. But I also think of some books as my friends and I like to have them around. They brighten my life.
Page 32.
As book collectors know all too well, we only regret our economies, never our extravagances.
Page 43.
Words are both symbols for things and very real things themselves.
Page 54.
Nothing in our lives is pure and unalloyed; we love and we hate simultaneously, we act well and badly from one moment to the next. Our very souls are pieced together like old quilts or rag rugs.
Page 54.
Anyone who writes a lot eventually develops, then starts to overuse, certain “fallback” words.
Page 55.
Assigning grades is the worst part of being a teacher. Do you judge by performance and accomplishment alone? How important is effort of improvement? Should once err on the side of kindness - more grade inflation! - or insist on a return to standards, whatever those are?
Page 62.
All of us remember the favorite books of our childhoods. That’s when stories affect us most, giving us a glimpse of the world beyond our bedroom walls or presenting various options for the kid of life we might aspire to.
Page 69.
We should … be vigilant in over-mythologizing reading at the expense of later, more grown-up books.
Page 70.
In effect, anthologies resemble dating. You enjoy some swell times and suffer through some awful ones, until one happy hour you encounter a story you really, really like and decide to settle down for a while with its author.
Page 75.
Sigh. I myself sometimes wish that I could be as sure of anything as many writers seem to be about everything.
Page 85.
I wouldn’t go so far as to say that my library - a mere agglomeration of pulp, glue, and ink - means more to me than living, breathing human beings, it’s a near thing.
Page 88.
Most stories about high temperatures lead to violence.
Page 89.
I loved my father but, like sons everywhere, I never listened to him.
Page 90.
Even though I possess the modern hardback, I always prefer to read books in their original editions whenever possible. Only those early formats possess the right feel, the right aura.
Pages 95-96.
I’m no investor: I only collect books and authors I care about When … I finally left Wonder Book and Video my wallet was certainly lighter than when I arrived, but then so was my heart.
Page 97.
There is no better conversation in the world than talking about books with longtime dealers and collectors.
Page 103.
As readers grow older, their tastes often become more rarefied more refined, more recherché.
Page 109.
The old ways may not always be best, but they still work for me.
Page 120.
One thing never does change: the books you really covet always cost more than you want to pay for them. But to borrow a phrase that women use of childbirth, the pain quickly vanishes when you finally hold that longed-for baby, or book, and know that it is yours forever.
Page 143.
With any justice, Heaven itself will resemble a vast used bookstore, with a really good café in one corner, serving coffee and Guinness and kielbasa to keep up one’s strength while growing and all around will be the kind of angels usually found in Victoria’s Secret catalogs.
Page 150.
Books don’t only furnish a room, they also make the best holiday gifts. Not that I said “books.” Kindles and Nooks and iPads may offer texts but word-pixels on a screen aren’t books.
Page 187.
Good books for even the youngest kids are still enjoyable by the most mature grown-up.
Page 198.
The goal of a just society should be to provide satisfying work, with a living wage to all its citizens. The jobs that are vitally important, truly dangerous or stressful, or inherently unattractive, should be the best compensated: teachers, coal-miners, emergency-room nurses, physicians and Pas, hospice workers, and, yes, trash collectors should all be extremely well paid. But work that deals mainly with intangibles, with the manipulation of words or numbers, should largely be its own reward. Corporate executives, who love to wheel and deal, ought to earn no more than poets, who love to play with language.
Page 217.
Books possess a shape and permanence that scattered pieces - disjecta membra - don’t.
Page 222.
But the prospect of spending years researching and writing about someone else’s life offends my vanity. I don’t want to submerge myself in another man or woman’s existence, I want to write about me, about the books and writers that I like.
Page 222.
I surreptitiously smuggled my new acquisitions into the house.
Page 230.
Writing that isn’t fun to read usually doesn’t get read.
Page 232.
The world of books is bigger than the current best-seller list.
Page 232.
Keep trying books outside your comfort zone. At least from time to time. True readers boldly go where they haven’t gone before.
Page 233.
Books don’t furnish a room. A personal library is a reflection of who you are and who you want to be, of what you value and what you desire, of how much you know and how much more you’d like to know.
Page 233.
Digital texts are all well and good, but books on shelves are a presence in your life. As such, they become a part of your day-to-day existence, reminding you, chastising you, calling to you. Plus, book collecting is, hands down, the greatest pastime in the world.
Page 233.
None of us, of course, will ever read all the books we’d like, but we can still make a stab at it.
Page 234.