Books by the Bed

John Wilson on reading what's at hand

On both sides of our bed upstairs, there are books. Wendy has a standing bookshelf against an interior wall, next to the head of the bed (the entire Brother Cadfael series, which we both love; lots of poetry; books in a range of genres by Wendell Berry; the three volumes of Kristin Lavransdatter in Tiina Nunnally's translation; devotional books; and more). I have a series of stacks more or less level with the bed and running alongside it, with a narrow “passageway” by means of which I get in bed. From bed we can look to the right to the large windows facing west (where, for instance, in the wee hours, we sometimes watch the moon set).

Many of the books in my bedside stacks are by writers I particularly admire; many (though not all) are fiction or pertaining to fiction. I read lots of different things, including a good deal of poetry, but those books are mostly elsewhere. The stack next to the foot of our bed includes a bunch of books by Viktor Shklovsky, including Energy of Delusion: A Book About Plot, which could be the subject of one of these columns down the road. The next stack includes all the books of A.G. Mojtabai (mostly novels). If you haven’t ever tried her, please do so. Now would be a good time to catch up; she has a new book coming from Slant around the end of the year. (Here’s a piece I did for First Things on her most recent book, Thirst, a novella.)

Almost all of Russell Hoban’s novels are nearby, next to Len Deighton, and a couple of fat paperbacks from that ongoing Stanford University Press Nietzsche project have somehow landed on top, adjoining a big stack of slim volumes in which Simenon keeps company with Patrick Modiano. Nearer the head of the bed are several volumes of stories by Chekhov and some short novels by Dostoevsky. That same stack includes a book of stories by Linda McCullough Moore, This Road Will Take Us Closer to the Moon, and Marly Youmans’ novella Catherwood; the rest of Marly’s books—poetry as well as fiction—are downstairs in the front room, in the bookshelves we hired some Polish carpenters (what characters!) to build for us after we moved into this house in the summer of 1995. She shares a shelf with Barbara Pym, Muriel Spark, Beryl Bainbridge, and Brian Moore, plus a few movie-related volumes (Ozu, Kurosawa, Bergman).

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Pride of place (the stack closest to the head of the bed) belongs to Ross Macdonald. All eighteen of his Lew Archer novels are there in the paperback edition issued by Vintage some years ago, in order of original publication, starting with The Moving Target (1949) and ending with The Blue Hammer (1976). Periodically I read through the whole bunch—in order, of course—and the books are festooned with Post-it Notes, on many of which I’ve scribbled something. Several hardcover editions have elbowed their way in, too; it’s fun now and then to compare notes from different readings. And in the big room next to our bedroom, formerly known as “the study,” where books have long since filled all the shelves and the long central table, moving on to colonize floor-space, my eye will sometimes be caught by a Ross Macdonald paperback from an earlier edition—not least, the Bantam paperbacks by means of which so many readers of my generation followed Lew Archer’s cases.

That happened just last week, when I noticed a tattered copy of Macdonald’s brilliant novel The Goodbye Look. First published in hardcover in May of 1969, this was the book that put him on the map for a wide range of readers. The Bantam paperback followed in June 1970; my copy (which I’ve had for almost 54 years now, I calculate) was from the second printing. Its front cover is gone. Years ago, I used strapping tape to hold the book together; it’s still doing the job, though the binding is torn and some pages are loose.

This copy is loaded with Post-it Notes from successive readings over the years. Here’s how the novel begins: “The lawyer, whose name was John Trutwell, kept me waiting in the outer room of his offices. It gave the room a chance to work me over gently.” On the next page (said of Truttwell), “His left hand drifted softly over his side hair, as if he was fingering an heirloom.” A Post-it Note to myself instructs me to see p. 121, where there’s a passage rhyming with this one. I felt a strong temptation to break my rule (“You MUST read the books in order”) and have so far resisted but not without a struggle. The reason for the rule is that only by reading the books in sequence can you follow the evolution of Macdonald the writer and Archer the character and the world they inhabit over time.

While was I thinking about this, it occurred to me to imagine what the world was like 54 years before I had first read The Goodbye Look in 1970. Even though I do this sort of time-framing a lot, I was stunned, suddenly trying to hold in my head (at the same time) the world of 1916 (!), the world as I knew it in 1970 (I turned 22 that June), and the world we inhabit in 2024. I’ll have to keep this thought-experiment in mind as I’m trying to induce younger readers to give Ross Macdonald a look.

But then again, a particular kind of time-travel is part of the reason that reading fiction (and literature more generally) is indispensable—not least because there are occasions when we want to escape from the present!

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