The Book Book

I wish it was quaint, this book I have called “what i read.” If only it was cloth-covered and full of thick, rough pages. If only the designer had chosen to capitalize the “i" so I didn’t have to (with my teacher’s red pen.)

I bought it from a big-box bookstore that sells books and scented candles and cashmere scarves and yoga mats, and it’s one of millions, I’m sure.

I was probably perusing the bargain tables, covered with senseless towers of mark-downs, searching for Roddy Doyle or Colum McCann. As I recall, this pursuit was rarely fruitful. However, on what must’ve been a biting January afternoon half-way through my second year of University studies, I pulled it from the Journals/Notebooks shelf near the store’s exit and paid for it with money from my student loan.

Each crisp page of “what i read” is lined with the alternating solid and dotted lines of a primary-school exercise book. Some pages have definitions for words like “genre,” “literature,” and “contemplate.” Others bear patronizing sentence starters like “stories i want to share…” and “quotes to remember…” Most pages, the useful pages, have fields for Title, Author, Date, and Thoughts. “what i read” is a record of every book I’ve read for just over five years. There are one hundred and sixteen entries.

When he saw it for the first time, my husband asked me why I needed a book to keep track of my books. He gestured toward the bedroom wall and the bursting bookshelves lining it: Isn’t this enough of a reminder? First, I said, because I have a terrible memory for facts. If asked, I wouldn’t be able to recall the color of my car, let alone the title of the book I’d read a month earlier. Second, for the memories.

For some, a particular scent, a certain song, or a familiar landscape draws vivid memories from the recesses of the mind. When I smell Downy fabric softener, it reminds me of the fair-haired boy I had a crush on as a child. Anne Murray’s You Needed Me seats me behind my dad in the grey leather of our Mercedes, driving through the star-studded blackness of an Alberta night. “A Poetry Handbook” by Mary Oliver, takes me back to a cross-trainer in a crowded gym, my hands and forehead slick with sweat, where I learned the power of hard consonants and liquid vowels. “A Bird in the House” by Margaret Lawrence lands me simultaneously in Manawaka, Manitoba, and the class of a certain untenured professor whose spelling made me wince.

Each title peels away years and months and days, exposing the version of myself that lived and read and learned. Each book holds inky words that spell out its story, as well as the invisible tale of my life while I read.

Shivering in the chill of my air-conditioned office, I read “The Shape of Irish History” by A.T. Q. Stewart. I am preparing for a Post-Colonial Irish Literature course starting next term. When I’m not serving the gruff truck drivers at my shipping/receiving window, I’m reading about Bloody Sunday and the IRA. Names like Sinn Féin and Éamon de Valera perplex and intrigue me. Like a burr stuck somewhere I can’t reach, I start itching for the Irish.

My copy of D.H. Lawrence’s “Sons and Lovers” is a mass-produced paperback with an illustration of a 19^th-century woman cradling her baby boy. The rough pages are awash with Alberta’s blinding November sun as my train emerges from the tunnel to cross the North Saskatchewan. The icy-dead winter compliments the bleakness of the novel. Love, it seems, is forever wasted, I write later. It either spoils or hurts and never benefits anyone. In the end, all it does is cause pain.

The South-African student always wears a green ball-cap, does not speak with an accent, or allow anyone to get a word in edgewise. Shyam Selvadurai’s “Funny Boy” is on the desk in front of me, beneath the fingers I can’t stop tapping. I feel a familiar panic. It creeps up on me each time I attend my Marginalized Literature class. The assigned readings pull at me like Velcro, but the terms being shoved through that space—tetralinguistic model, deterritorialization—weigh like a boulder on my chest. Any academic gains I think I have achieved to this point are made insignificant by my struggle to stay afloat in this class.

DATE: June 2005

TITLE: “Une Vie”

AUTHOR : Guy de Maupassant

THOUGHTS : Life happens when you understand dreams aren’t meant to be realised, they are meant to be perpetuated.

Tears stream down my face as I read the tragic final pages of “A Fine Balance” by Rohinton Mistry. Beside me, on the old tube TV, the Edmonton Oilers are wasting their powerplay in the final minutes of a game versus a better team. My soon-to-be husband rocks back and forth near the window in a brown velvet recliner, his Papa opposite him in a quilt-covered LazyBoy. Papa is leaning forward, animated by the pathetic play of his favorite team, only to lean back and sigh when the buzzer sounds and the Oilers lose again.

“The Birth House” by Amy McKay is a book I can’t read fast enough. I am working at a medical clinic, assistant to the head MD. The hours I spend seated at a desk beside hers are torturous with the book not four inches from my left knee, peeking out from my oversized bag. As soon as the clock strikes coffee break or lunch break or afternoon break, I run away from the sterile vinyl into the blinding summer sun, clutching a baggie of apple slices—the book already open. I walk and walk and read and read and it pains me to tuck the book back into my bag when my fifteen minutes are up.

Like the hush of heat which greeted me those August days, I’m comforted by the unwritten memories waiting between the pages of “what i read.” Mostly. Because like any carefully kept record, it’s near impossible to disregard the not-so-comforting recollections. They grin and snarl menacingly behind otherwise benign titles reminding me that my memory must not, cannot, be selective. Unlike the impression one gets from cheery snapshots in a photo album, life is not all smiles.

I struggle through Jared Diamond’s “Guns, Germs, and Steel.” The content is interesting, but I am focused on which bits to remember so I can bring them up in conversation. I’m also trying to remember the difference between the eight types of red wine and that Shiraz and Syrah mean the same thing. I have spent too much money shopping for clothing—all variations in black—that suit the impressive posture the older man expects, no, insists upon. He might has well be Pizarro, and I, the Inca of Peru.

Nearly every page is dog-eared in “Help Me Live,” by Lori Hope. Each down-turned page represents a full-stop, a slam-down-on-the-table instance or a quietly-close-the-book-and-my-eyes moment while my husband’s mother fights breast cancer. Death, in all its synonyms and metaphors, lurks behind every reluctant smile and underscores uncomfortable silence. It scrawls a question mark beside every plan for the future and poisons even the most beautiful sunsets.

The book is hardly the thing. The record is no more than an empty list without the memories; a scattering of dry bones without the flesh and blood. It evokes a story of another kind. One that can never be read.