On throwing books across the room

I read in bed at night. When I sense sleep rippling towards me, I drop the book to the floor (I don’t have a nightstand), hoping to catch the wave before my body and brain remind me that no, it’s not that easy. You can’t expect the very first breaker to sweep you away. More often than not, sleep washes right past and I pick the book up again.

It’s rare that instead of dropping a book to the floor, I toss it across the room. I had that experience the other night. Deprived of library books for most of the year, I’ve been spelunking in my own bookshelves. Seeing if the books I’ve lugged from apartment to apartment are still worth their shelf space.

Where books are concerned, my impulse is to celebrate instead of criticize, so I won’t name names here. Suffice it to say that I was rereading a book about a very young Englishman who gets dumped. The man writes with maddening assurance that his minor love story, a blip on the decade of his twenties, is universal, fodder for a treatise on Love with a capital L.

I looked in vain for what I’d previously appreciated about the book. The author revels in the idea that we create our own grand loves, which have little to do with the object of desire. There are flashes of cleverness amid the overwrought prose. But the book huffs out an atmosphere of detachment and solipsism that made my mood plummet. Although it’s supposedly about love, the book has no heart.

Maybe because I’m so hungry these days for insight, I didn’t feel disappointed in this book; I felt enraged. Before I knew it the book was skittering across the scarred floorboards of my studio apartment. My dismay at my own action was matched by my incredulity that I’d ever found this book worthy of my time.

At some point in my life, this story must have hit a nerve, though maybe it was more that I wanted to be the kind of person who appreciated such convoluted cleverness, because everyone else seemed to. Or maybe it was that I’d absorbed the centuries-old lesson of who among us gets to speak for the erroneously named Everyman.

Part of what pissed me off about this book is that it reminded me that I usually dwell at the other end of the spectrum. Though occasionally I’ll experience an upswelling of confidence, much like a manic episode, flooding me with the feeling that I have something useful to say, most of the time I assume that my truths are my own, a few tarnished pennies rattling around in an old cigar box. I don’t expect them to ever be the coin of the realm, to stand in for larger truths, with a capital T.

As a writer and human being, I often find myself pinned at the intersection of the born-of-privelege idea that what I say matters, and my abiding fear that it very much doesn’t. It’s an uncomfortable place to be, especially when you’re trying to finish a sentence.

So much has happened in my own life since I first picked up that Young Man Dumped book, and so much has happened in our collective life, not least, this yearlong collective viral trauma that seems to go on and on. Our reading habits change as we grow, as individuals and as a culture. When things get rough we want fluff that helps us forget, or stories with a depth that we couldn’t quite plumb before crisis carved out space for those difficult truths to reverberate.

The funny thing is that I send books–old ways of thinking–sailing across the room before I have anything to replace them with. Or no, that’s not quite right. I’ve got piles of books, but I’m betting that very few of them will hit that bittersweet spot where it imparts exactly what I need to hear, right here, right now. This is where writers start to wonder, If what I need isn’t out there, should I try to write it myself?

What books are you throwing across the room these days? And what are you picking up instead?