Dewey Decimal System Notes

So...being book people, we do book things. Like go to our local library, the Billie Jean King Main Library, a half mile away. It's pretty cool looking, plus all the cool activities, plus the playground in the back side. We try to make it each Saturday.

It was unexpectedly closed on a recent visit.

The other day, as the kids perused the sections they like---Cass in the graphic novel and middle school reader sections; Camille in the comics, young readers, and art book sections---I figured they should know about Dewey and his decimal system.

So I went to a computer and paused for a second, thinking of what to look up. I really wanted to pick a book that I could actually take home, that I would actually want to take home, and that they would most likely have.

I settled on a National Book Winner, the Non-fiction winner from 1978:

So, I showed the numbers to Camille (Cass was gone doing his thing) and I said, "Now we go look for them." We took off, looking at the sides of the shelves and followed the line down to the 900s. We did have to go to the second story, but still, it was a scavenger hunt that was just following numbers.

And here's the book, another masterpiece by Matthiessen:

But don't take my word for it; if you just Google the number, you can see that the Interwebs are properly schooled in Dewey's system:

Like Shadow Country before it, this book is incredible. At times, it reads as a deep and well informed meditation and interpretation on Buddhism. At other times, it reads as a travelogue of a 250+ mile hike into the Himalaya written by a New Yorker, an erudite and openminded New Yorker, but still. And at other times it's about a grieving husband and father, who's wife had passed less than a year before to cancer, and he left his nine-year old with some friends to take this hike.

The last half of the last sentence on the first day, September 28th (as each "chapter" is a day), is indicative of Matthiessen's style, the use of intricate wordplay and enormous words are mostly absent, and yet the lyricism with ideas persists: "...in one day's walk we are a century away."

You can see why Pynchon likes Matthiessen. The writer's writer, the only winner of the National Book Award for both Fiction and Nonfiction, and the founder of the Paris Review in the postwar years...but he was secretly working for the CIA and spying on his writerly pals. Matthiessen was also the writer who popularized the plight of Leonard Peltier, who was finally released in February of this year.

Anyway, the Dewey Decimal System is now part of our kids' onboarding software. Because it's so... important...?