Two months ago President Obama and Marilynne Robinson had a lengthy conversation, not about foreign or domestic policy, economics or politics in general. 
The conversation, under the guise of an interview for the NY Times Review of Books, happened because the President is a big fan of Robinson’s work. I get that–so am I. I just finished her collection of essays When I Was a Child I Read Books this morning; the final essay “Cosmology” began with this description of Edgar Allen Poe:
I have always thought of him as a man waiting out the endless night of his life with a book in his hand, some quaint and curious volume of forgotten lore, noting the smell and feel of the leather binding, the pretty trace of gilding on the spine, almost too moved by the gratuitous humanity of the thing to open it and put himself in the power of whatever old music still lived in it.
God, I wish I could write like that. And God, I love books.
I was part of a small book group discussion a bit over a week ago, a group that meets once every other month. This was only my second time as part of this group;
I went because they were discussing Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead at my recommendation. There were only five of us—the other four are regulars in a different discussion group I lead once a month after church, so we know each other well and are good friends. Gilead is one of my favorite novels (in my top two or three) and our conversation was wonderful. But I could not help being distracted a couple of times as I noticed the difference between my copy of the novel and theirs. My copy is very used and looks it, with a coffee stain on the back cover that seeped through to the final twenty pages or so, lots of underlining, annotation, and other evidence that this was my fourth or fifth time through the book. The copies in my friends’ hands all looked alike and very different from mine. They were all pristine hardbacks, snugly covered with clear protective sleeves, all sporting a small white square at the bottom of the spine containing a few indecipherable letters and numbers. They were, in other words, library books. I don’t get it.
Don’t get me wrong, I think the lending library is one of Benjamin Franklin’s greatest inventions, right up there with the Franklin stove, street cleaning, electricity and our country. But it’s a good thing that the success of libraries does not depend on people like me. I have spent a lot of time over the past three weeks in our little library recliner, due to my broken ankle, so I’ve had two of the many bookshelves in our house in view more than usual. I love how books look on a shelf—arranging them is one of my favorite pastimes. I love how they feel, how they smell. I love that they are mine. Hence my problem with borrowing books from a library—those books are not mine. I have the same attitude about books as Gollum has about the Ring of Power. 
They are my “Precious.” Probably only 20% of the books on our bookshelves are ones that I have read more than once; with Jeanne unemployed we could probably make a month’s worth of grocery money with a book sale. But it ain’t happening. These books are mine; there is a great difference between owning a book and borrowing one.
These attitudes, of course, tell you everything you need to know about my opinion of things like Kindles and Nooks. Once in the middle of an airplane flight I was deeply engrossed in reading Hilary Mantel’s Booker Prize-winning novel Wolf Hall. As the woman seated in the seat across the aisle one row in front of me returned from a journey to the facilities, she noticed what I was reading. “Do you like it?” she asked. “I love it,” I replied. “So do I!” she exclaimed as she pulled her Kindle out of her purse.” “I’m reading it too! Isn’t that weird?” I thought something that an extrovert or a rude person might have said out loud: 
“It would be a weird coincidence if you were actually reading, but looking at words on a screen is not the same thing as reading.” As I’ve said many times to many people over the past several years, when they invent a Kindle (or whatever) that feels and smells like a real book, I’ll buy one.
I have written about my obsession with books and the peculiar problems this obsession causes before, inspired by a “99 Book Nerd Problems” list a Facebook acquaintance sent me (it reminded her of me—I can’t imagine why).
Let’s call these “book geek problems.” I have encountered a few more of them recently.
Only four pages to go . . . and the doctor will see you now. This one just happened to me two weeks ago—on consecutive days. I always have a book with me to read if there is the slightest chance that I will have to wait or be in line for more than one minute.
First on the Tuesday after my bicycle mishap as I waited for my ankle to be x-rayed at an Urgent Care facility, then (when I turned out I had a broken fibula) the next day in the orthopedist’s office, I made myself as comfortable as I could with a painful leg, pulled my book out of my carrying bag, put my reading glasses on, and settled in for what I assumed would be at least a half hour of reading the novel I was in the middle of. On both days I heard “Mr. Morgan?” from the nurse at the door just as I was at a crucially interesting part of the story. Far be it from me to complain too much about being called into the doctor’s office more quickly than I expected, but they could have timed it better. Very inconvenient.
Books that won’t stay open when you’re trying to read and eat at the same time. This is a particular problem since I refuse to crease the spines of books I am reading in order to get them to stay open. I wouldn’t like a cracked spine, and I assume a book wouldn’t either. I have come up with some pretty creative methods for getting a book to stay open while my hands are occupied, involving other books, clamps, paper cli
ps—but they don’t always work. One time my book broke free from its restraints and landed in my food. But at least its spine was intact.
Bent page corners. After hearing a nice interview with Mary Oliver on Krista Tippett’s “On Being” radio program a few days ago, I decided to try Oliver’s poetry on for size. I’m poetry challenged; I find it by far the most difficult genre of literature to resonate with. But I liked what I heard her read during the interview very much so I ordered a couple used copies of her poetry volumes—advertised as “Like New”—from Amazon. One of them showed up in the mail very quickly with no marks or cracked spine. Good thing. But it has two dog-eared pages. Very Bad thing. 
There should be a special circle of hell for people who fold the corners of pages over to mark their place—have such persons never heard of bookmarks or scraps of paper used as bookmarks? Persons in the dog-eared circle of hell would have their ears folded in half and laid flat by bibliophilic demons every day for eternity.
Clearly I have a number of book geek issues—and this is only a sampling. Thank goodness I live with a person who, at least to a certain extent, has learned to accommodate and even facilitate my peccadilloes. I remember, though, when I found out early in our relationship that she cracks the spines of paperbacks. It was almost a deal breaker.
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