Sweaty Hands

While doing background work for my Library Blog--taking pictures of my books--I noticed while handling my copy of Tree of Smoke that while the dust jacket looks in rather good shape, the thing in its entirety felt shabby in my hands.

It was then I remembered. These books, after having been read, get replaced on the shelf and then only looked at occasionally--and then while they sit in place--or loaned out. A great many of them were read while we lived in Brooklyn, since living in New York means, for the great many of us, lots of time spent on the subway. When it came to books with dust jackets, I'd leave the dust jackets in their place on the shelf, looking like the book was chilling there, while I carried the books everywhere with me.

These books were usually thick and looked a little silly while being carried around, and after a while, my sweatyness would make a serious impression on the hard-back covers. After long enough, the books would appear worn and shabby, covered with the remnants of subway funk, sweaty palm-ness, and tobacco smoke.

Since I had my camera and was already taking some book pictures, I realized I wanted to document some of the biggest noticeable books in my collection.

The first book I did this with was probably my favorite book of all time (which says something for a bibliophile like myself) Pynchon's Against the Day. This book was a gift from my mom after I read a review of it and learned of this writer. Where had I been all this time, I remember thinking halfway through.

I found a note from an English professor of mine suggesting I check out this guy named Thomas Pynchon, but after ignoring the advice, it took me a few years to figure it out.

The binding and edges are all dirty and stained and the spine is creaky. The pages are marked up with pencil (a necessity for this 1000+ page novel, almost a collection of five or six novels), as well as summaries in the back pages and a character tree inside the front cover (all in my own hand).

On the shelf it looks cool, sitting nicely in the Pynchon section.

The next book in this discussion is Roberto Balano's The Savage Detectives. Bolanyo (no enya) was a Chilean writer/poet who moved to Mexico and started a poetry movement, and there are sections of Savage Detectives that cover that exact topic but in a fictionalized form. The book follows a strange format: the first section is fast paced and like a pulpy-action movie--we follow the young protagonist while he tries to write poems, impress the Chilean patriarchs, and have as much sex as he can. It ends abruptly as the action reaches a crescendo. The second section makes up the bulk of the book and is a series of interviews from various players from the first section, all seemingly taking place more than a decade after the events of the first action sequence section. After we get a sense of what might have transpired, the final section shows the end of the starting scene as if there was no split in the action. I haven't read Bolanyo's 2666, supposedly his masterpiece, but I have been thinking about picking it up since the translation hit the States a while ago.

And lastly we have the book that started me off on the path to this post, Tree of Smoke by Denis Johnson. The reason I chose this order to present the books is that this is the order that I read the books in real subway-riding life. Tree of Smoke is an excellent look at the involvement of the United States in Vietnam, how it affected the a slew of parties involved, and represents specific type of companion to Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow, arguably one of the most important books written in English since WWII.

Gravity's Rainbow is set during WWII, but was published in 1972 and is truly about Vietnam; Tree of Smoke is set during Vietnam, but was published in 2007 and is truly about our newest war of choice, Iraq.