The Book Stack

The books beside the chair have begun to resemble a disciplinary committee.

One will improve your habits. Another will repair your understanding of the world. A third has been waiting so long that picking it up now would require an apology. You walk past with a cup of coffee and feel vaguely behind in a life nobody has explained the grading system for.

It is a hell of a thing to do to a chair.

Pleasure reading can have a less ambitious address. A book within reach. Enough light to see the page. A little time that has not already been promised to somebody else. The dog may have first refusal on the chair; that negotiation is between the two of you.

Build the stack for the person who will actually sit there tonight.

Give the evening a vote

By the time you get a quiet stretch, your appetite may have very little in common with your intentions at the bookstore. You wanted the enormous historical novel at two on a Sunday afternoon. At nine on a working Tuesday, you may want somebody to tell you a good story without requiring you to remember seventeen dukes.

Keep three kinds of company within reach.

One can be an old favorite. You already know how to get into it. That familiarity is useful when you have spent the day explaining yourself to people and would enjoy arriving somewhere you are recognized.

The second can be whatever is pulling at your curiosity now: a novel, a musician’s memoir, an account of a place you have never been. Let the curiosity be specific. “I want to know what happened” will get you further into a book than “a better person would have read this.”

The third can offer a shorter visit: poems, essays, short stories, a book of photographs with captions worth reading. Something with a natural stopping place when the evening runs out.

You can assemble this from a shelf you already own. The unread book does not acquire greater moral authority because you paid full price for it.

A few places to begin

These four choices offer different forms of company. Pick the one whose subject interests you; borrowing a copy or reading a publisher’s sample is a sensible first move.

A small island and people with sharp edges

Tove Jansson’s The Summer Book, translated from Swedish by Thomas Teal, follows six-year-old Sophia and her grandmother through a summer on an island in the Gulf of Finland. The novel is arranged in twenty-two vignettes. New York Review Books: The Summer Book

That combination makes it a promising choice when you want a particular place to spend time in, and people whose lives fit within it. Give the opening a chance before treating the short sections as convenient stopping points. You may want to linger. A summer in a book is also available in the middle of lousy weather, without the expense or administrative burden of becoming a tourist.

A neighborhood, one voice at a time

Sandra Cisneros’s The House on Mango Street centers on Esperanza Cordero growing up in Chicago. Its story unfolds through vignettes about childhood, identity and the people around her. Penguin Random House: The House on Mango Street

Try it when you want fiction about belonging somewhere while imagining where else a life might go. Read the early pieces together so the neighborhood can begin to accumulate around you. If you encountered the book in school, you are free to meet it again with the teacher absent and your own years available for comparison. A familiar title can contain a new reading.

A poem, with a little space afterward

Mary Oliver selected the poems in Devotions herself. The collection draws from work spanning No Voyage and Other Poems in 1963 through Felicity in 2015, with the natural world central to its concerns. Penguin Random House: Devotions

A selected collection gives you many possible entrances. Choose a poem, read it, then look away from the page for a moment. See what remains. If a sentence draws you back, return to it. You have no obligation to extract an inspirational caption. The poem can keep its own life, including the parts that refuse to become helpful advice.

Something that sends your attention outdoors

Aldo Leopold’s A Sand County Almanac brings together writing about the natural world and an argument for a land ethic: care in the relationship between people and the land. The Aldo Leopold Foundation describes its mixture of science, history, humor and prose. The Aldo Leopold Foundation: A Sand County Almanac

Consider it when you want to think about the place beyond the window. Keep your own surroundings in the conversation as you read: the strip of trees behind the fence, a creek you cross without looking down, the patch of ground the neighborhood argues about. You can examine an older writer’s ideas and bring your own questions to them. Admiration does not require surrendering your judgment.

Put it where your life happens

A stack hidden in the spare room has a difficult job. Move one book to the place where you already spend an unclaimed few minutes. Put a bookmark in it. Give your glasses a reliable home nearby, if you use them. The room does not need a complete personality transplant.

Read in the format that suits you. A paperback can travel. An e-reader can hold the next choice. An audiobook can keep you company while you fold the mountain of laundry that has apparently applied for permanent residence. None of these requires a defense before the Council of Serious Readers.

You can also stop a book. Set it aside for another season or return it altogether. Some books arrive at the wrong time. Some simply fail to interest you. Continuing out of spite is an expensive use of an evening, even when the book was free.

If you lose your place in a paragraph, go back. If you have read the same paragraph three times and still want no part of it, try another book or go to bed. Your attention is allowed to have a weather system.

When something does catch you, leave a trace for yourself. Fold a scrap of paper around the page. Write down a title somebody mentioned. Send a friend the name of the book and the reason you thought of them, if you want to. Keep the recommendation human-sized: what interested you, what you think might interest them.

Over time, the stack can become a small, disorderly record of a life being enjoyed: a borrowed novel, a dog-eared favorite, a book about birds opened to a page that finally settled an argument, a poem you keep returning to without having found a satisfactory explanation.

Leave room for the coffee. Sit down before it gets cold.