TWELVE RULES FOR THE BOOKISH LIFE

(Of course, the bookish life needs no rules.)

by Doug Sikkema
March 1 st 2019

Appears in Spring 2019

With gratitude for half a decade of service alongside the Commentteam, and in particular for the mentorship and friendship of Brian Dijkema and Jamie Smith, two of the most bookish men I’ve ever had the pleasure to know. May your tribes increase!

1. Read widely. If it be strange, bid it welcome. Your hopes of becoming more capacious and hospitable will depend less on the depth than the breadth of your “to-read” list.
2. Always have a “to-read” list on the go. Even one that’s absurdly, impossibly long. If you believe in heaven: there’ll be time.
3. That said: life is short. If you don’t want to finish a book: don’t. You may not be ready for it. (Or the book is rubbish. There’s always that possibility.)
4. Readymade lists of “Great Texts” are guides for the wise, and absolutes for fools. Don’t sweat your ability as a judge. You’ll know a good book after one read. You’ll know a great work by patience and perseverance and the joys they produce after a lifetime of rereading. 
5. Sorry, but reading books—even great ones—will not make you a better person. If that were the case, there’d be fewer illiterate saints and well-read ********. (Remember, they found great books in Nazi trenches.) So read, and with fear and trembling ask the Spirit to use even this to your edification.
6. Listen first, then respond. Reading is not a business meeting: the less of an agenda you have, the better. NB: If you’ve gone to grad school, my apologies: you’ll have some unlearning to do.
7. Patronize the local library often. Unless of course you are on the run because of overdue fines. Then pay those first or move to a new town.
8. Let books flood your home and wash ashore on coffee tables, dressers, and nightstands. Your kids and grandkids will, one day, thank you (even if your spouse, in the present, does not).
9. Invest in the future. Buy and borrow books you have no time to read with the inkling that some strange, yet-unknown descendant of yours might.
10.  Find a place to read where you can learn the art of appearing still yet moving with great speed over vast distances, quiet yet in the full thrum of a resonant inner life.
11. Reading is not solitary. You will break bread with many authors who, although long dead, will seem more alive to you than your neighbours.
12. But even this is no excuse to escape. And escape is one of the most dangerous temptations of the bookish life. To read as an escape is to surrender and be imprisoned by the ideal of no-place and no one. Books should never be a fire exit from the slow burn of a humdrum existence. Rather, they should provide a “momentary stay against confusion,” helping you return to the real world empowered to reimagine your particular place there, seeing with new eyes that particularly crooked neighbour with your own particularly crooked heart.

My book club just read "The Library Book" by Susan Orlean (2018). To a person the group thought the book mediocre at best but it has some redeeming qualities for the book obsessed. (I liked it a bit better than the rest of the group.) It's about the fire that destroyed the Central Public Library in Los Angeles on April 29, 1986. It also includes lots of interesting history of libraries in the US. The fire occurred on the same day as the nuclear accident at Chernobyl so it got minimal press coverage.

Great list, thanks for posting!

After an absence of three years, I have resuscitated this thread @jamie

Top of my summer to-read list….

https://www.nationalreview.com/2022/06/a-love-letter-to-shakespeare/

I was about to Like your original post and then discovered I had Liked it 3 years ago! I am in some kind of time warp or is that just a bookish fantasy?

No, you are fine, Jamie and I are also fine. Cannot believe it’s been three years!

Probably the best book I read in the last year (and I read many books) is The Lincoln Highway by Amor Towles. I didn't expect it to be so great but he truly knows how to write.The characters are wonderful. It is fiction but I was surprised to learn that there really is a Lincoln Highway crossing the USA. A long book but you will want to finish it!

A book I read which tops my “best book I’ve read” list is George Saunders’ “Lincoln in the Bardo”.  (Coincidence about the name Lincoln appearing in both our noteworthy books.) I will ever again walk past or visit a cemetery again without thinking about this book.

Your suggestion has been on my to-read Kindle list for awhile — and it is now next in line!  Thanks.

George Saunders is a great author. I was zooming my son in H K recently and his book club was reading another Saunders book. 

The dreadful murders of four college students in Idaho brought this unsolved 1966 Maplewood murder to mind…

…

What it current  acceptance of mental illness on our streets, in our homes, and within our families, is not the answer? What if self- medication is a delusion invented by the uninfected to  ward off guilt?  

Modern society  could not accept the madhouses of the past when the solution of pills and potions represented freedom for those afflicted. Tent cities and the freedom for the sick  to live unsupervised appear to be the outcome. There has to be a better way to care for those we know and love.

https://www.thefp.com/p/my-friends-descent-into-madness-and

Not exactly the book to give for Mother or Father’s day gifts, perhaps. But a book to read for self education and awareness.

When medicines became available and the huge terrible "asylums" were closed, it's my understanding the idea was that help/support/treatment would be available at community facilities/clinics.  However, Reaganism (among other afflictions) intervened, and little or no funding was was provided.  Not to mention NIMBY for clinics and supervised housing.  It's been a colossal snafu and social failing, recently mitigated somewhat by the parity requirements of ACA/Obamacare and by increasing willingness to discuss publicly.  You're right, there's a looonnnng way to go. 

Salt Lake City has had success (and saved money ultimately) with a "housing first" approach that gives troubled people the decency of a place to stay and easier on-site access social/medical services, and i think our current town Milwaukee, and others?, is following suit.

Certainly, it's a conundrum walking the line between too much impingement on peoples' freedom, and reasonable care for their welfare.

I have a brother with schizophrenia. mjc's summary is correct. Once we've rounded up and eliminated all the trans people, maybe we can tackle a genuine problem like this one.

(One correction: The ACA isn't helping in states that refuse to expand Medicaid.)

mjc said:

When medicines became available and the huge terrible "asylums" were closed, it's my understanding the idea was that help/support/treatment would be available at community facilities/clinics.  However, Reaganism (among other afflictions) intervened, and little or no funding was was provided.  Not to mention NIMBY for clinics and supervised housing.  It's been a colossal snafu and social failing, recently mitigated somewhat by the parity requirements of ACA/Obamacare and by increasing willingness to discuss publicly.  You're right, there's a looonnnng way to go. 

Certainly, it's a conundrum walking the line between too much impingement on peoples' freedom, and reasonable care for their welfare.

For an explanation or a solution to human behavior, look no further than The Bard. Some folks on these threads will not read anything from the source of this link, The National Review, but that is their way of coping with filtered knowledge, I would suppose. 

The rest of us will wallow in the words of Mr. Shakespeare,  happily, and digest them and analyze them with pleasure!

https://www.nationalreview.com/magazine/2023/05/01/how-shakespeare-changed-everything/

Wonderful story about books - and survival….

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/10/06/arts/paperback-world-war-ii-grolier-club-nyc.html

Just finished JM Coetzee's most recent, The Pole and highly recommend it. 

Currently reading  Beware of Pity by the great Stefan Zweig.  I think it's Zweig's only long novel.

Then onto Ms Ice Sandwiches, a novella by Mieko Kawami.

In the non-fiction category most recently read The Return by Libyan author Hisham Matar, which won a Pulitzer.