by Annie Spence
Though you’re weathered, you’ve still got that quiet lopsided charm about you. I even thought about smelling you. Your pages look just the right shade of yellow, your text just dark and smoodgie enough to give me a deep-nostril thrill ride. The only better smell than a creaky paperback for a book sniffer like me is a real inky graphic novel. I mean, I’m not going to smell you. But I am going to get you out of here before your owners inevitably forget to buy toilet paper and things get desperate.
Run away with me. We live in modern times. They can look at their phones when they’re taking a dump like everybody else. I’ve got baby wipes in my purse. Maybe I’ll come back for the Franzen, but I gotta go now. My legs are going numb.
Smell Ya Later,
ECONOMICS—Herera, Sue
—Finance and Investing
—Booooooorrrrring
Dear Women of the Street,
To be honest I thought you were going to be about hookers. I have an old book about band groupies of the sixties. It’s appropriately titled Groupies. And it’s got interviews with all these women and men with fun names like Silky and Sunshine and Pogo. They ball their way through the British Invasion and have great hair. But they also speak frankly about how lonely the life is. You really get to know their crazy asses. I don’t want to compare you to other books, but that’s what I thought you were going to be like.
Sigh.
You’re about finance. You interview women named Muriel and Linda and Bernadette. No one has good hair, even though the illustrations are charcoal drawings. We found a business card advertising a weird and expensive-sounding plastic surgery in you when we pulled you off the shelf. And it’s been in there since the ’90s.
Your book jacket said you were provocative. I thought you would be out on the Street all the time. But you’ve been checked out twice. Like twelve years ago. A lot has happened out there while you’ve been in here on the Shelf. For starters, your profiles of Goldman Sachs employees need tweaking.
All right, I’m being snarky now and that’s not fair. It’s not that I wanted you to be about hookers. Finance can be a fascinating topic (Probably. I know all sorts of people come in looking for the book by that Free Money guy with the question mark jacket), and I’m sure these women worked really hard. So why do you have to refer to the longevity of their careers as the amount of time they’ve “been on the Street”?
Is it a Wall Street thing? Or did you maaaaybe sort of want to make people think about prostitutes? World’s toughest business … world’s oldest profession. Is it just me? Maybe it’s just me. You’re just not who I thought you were.
See You at the Book Sale,
FICTION—Maguire, Gregory
—Witch, Wicked
—Bitch, Still A
Dear Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West,
You were a sure thing, with your gilded pages and your fancy map on the inside cover. I can’t resist a book with a map in it. The combination of my love for the film The Wizard of Oz and the children’s book The True Story of the Three Little Pigs by Mr. A. Wolf (and Jon Scieszka) made me feel as if we couldn’t go wrong. I felt a special, singular connection to you, but I also felt camaraderie with all the people who were simultaneously realizing that they had to know why the Wicked Witch of the West turned out so rotten and green. It seemed like a good idea at the time.
So I bought you. And I slugged away at your four-hundred-and-then-some pages for months. I put my all into our relationship. I wanted to love you. I wanted to gush with my sister about you. I wanted to curl up on the couch on Thanksgiving and watch The Wizard of Oz from a different emotional vista. I wanted to see Elphaba the witch as more than just a bitter crone with a shoe fetish and really terrifying monkey friend-servants. I don’t know if you can understand the intense glee and expectation that make up the book lover’s baggage when approaching a tale like yours, a book that should have been there all along, and now suddenly was in my hands.
But after copious, co-pi-ous explanations of Ozian religious and political regimes and animal rights and looooots of misplaced resentment, I still think the western witch is a spiteful stone-cold bitch. And I get that the slippers were, like, a representation of her father’s love for her sister and not for her. But, come on, give it up, Elphaba. You were born green, big deal. Your sister had NO ARMS! She coped. Until that house fell on her.
We should have parted ways “In the Vinkus,” but I had a weird thing about staying loyal to you until the end. And like all relationships that last longer than they should, I let my anger boil over. I still couldn’t connect with your main character, and, on top of that, I was pissed about the other books I could have been reading. I had the urge to douse you with water and see if you evaporated before me like the old witch. So this is it. I’m putting you in a Little Free Library.
You’re Dead to Me,
AMERICAN AND CANADIAN—POETRY—Giovanni, Nikki
—Poets, Damn Good
Dear Nikki Giovanni’s Love Poems,
Oh geez. How can I describe love better than you? Can’t be done. So I have to try and stutter your own words back to you, like a … I’m no good at this … like a girl with a crush on her first-period Spanish teacher? Like an old car engine in the winter? Baach, I’ll just leave it up to you.
When I pick you up, I feel “glad as mortar / on a brick that knows / another brick is coming” because I know how much satisfaction I’m about to get. I’m about to get warm and smiley all over. You are everything love is. You’re sexy and playful and dizzy and also powerful and vibrant. And sometimes hurt and wanting more love.
I like to have you around in the kitchen so I can read a poem while the water boils and another while the butter melts, and so on. It’s a reminder to read slow and savor you, and the smells of the cooking make me more aware of my senses. “I Wrote a Good Omelet” is best read while frying eggs with no pants and bedhead. I know you know what I’m saying.
And I like to have you around on the coffee table so I can show you to my friends and we can talk about “And Yeah … This Is a Love Poem” or declare “Love Is” to one another.
But other times I’d just like to be alone with you so we can get into “When Gamble and Huff Ruled” and “Seduction” with no distractions. You’re a skinny-looking book, but you’re so big on feeling. Days after I’ve held you, I’m still thinking of you. Also you mention “Slow Hand” by the Pointer Sisters.
So,
you are
it
for me.
(That’s a poem for you.)
I really like having you around. I’m so glad you exist.
LOVE,
FICTION—McCarthy, Cormac
—Shush Now
Dear Blood Meridian,
You had one job. Keep him quiet. All your bloody bravado, and you couldn’t even manage to silence one husband for one goddamn night while I finished my book.
I had the idea last week when I wanted to read and Michael wanted to watch Breaking Bad. I thought, “Hey, this guy seems to be entertained by death spirals of unrelenting hopelessness. Maybe if I found a book that matched those sensibilities, he could enjoy that same broken-human trauma noiselessly, and I could read my twee novel in peace.”
Enter you.
It was a brilliant plan. Ah, but it worked too well. Have I read you before? No, sir. But I know all about your southwestern militias and your dead-baby trees and your Apache scalps. I know it all, compadre. I know It All. Because my husband won’t stop talking about you.
Here I am, trying to read my quirky Miriam Toews novel. It’s set in the smallest town in Canada. One of the characters is named Summer Feelin’. I have a perpetual “oh goody” smile on my face while I’m holding it. Then every five minutes:
Michael: “Shoosh. Men can be brutal.”
Me: “Mm.”
Michael, three minutes later: “This writer really tells shit how it happened, man. He’s like a war correspondent for a war that happened
a hundred years before he was born.”
Me: (aggravated sigh).
Michael, five minutes later: “The judge dude is the fucking devil, man. Let me read you one more part.”
Listen, I’m glad he likes you. I’m less than charmed with the philosophical theory you’re advancing that “humans are still awful and selfish; we’ve just come up with ways to fuck each other up without scalping.” But I was willing to deal with even this, if it allowed me to find out whether small-town Mayor Funk gets his visit from the Canadian prime minister after all. At the conclusion of MY book.
Now I’m confusing plots. Where was I? Oh right, It’s the Canada Day festival and the Mexican militia shows up and takes the Kid and the prime minister as slaves. No … Summer Feelin’ is trapped in an outhouse with the judge devil. Wait.
In order to avoid my becoming violent with my husband, thus proving his burgeoning theory, could you tone down the mind-blowing prose and the blind carnage? I’ve got like twenty pages left.
Take It Easy, Will Ya?
JUVENILE FICTION—Seuss, Dr.
—Activist Turtles
Dear Yertle the Turtle and Other Stories,
I think we’re going to be friends. Not you and me—we’re already tight. I love your wise tortoise rhymes. I mean that I think I’m going to be friends with your owner. She’s a new mom I met at the park and I’m here on my first playdate. Seeing you sticking out of her daughter’s diaper bag, your tale of ne’er-do-well Yertle and the toppling throne of turtles defeated by one burping activist tortoise called Mack—that says to me: this lady and her young child are probably not dicks.
You couldn’t have shown yourself at a better time. If I don’t find someone to buddy up with at the park, I’ll have to stay in my “assigned seat” on the outcast bench, with Bluetooth dad and the grandma with the MARGARITAVILLE T-shirt and the smoker’s cough. In the caste system of the Tot Lot, we’re down in the mud like your friend Mack there. We are without the kingdom comforts of jogging strollers, muffins, and discount codes for essential oils.
Those other moms, they are the rulers of all that they see. And what they see are other people’s weaker-than-thou kids taking too long at the slide and going barefoot in the community sandbox like goddamn heathens. It’s no wonder their own offspring feel the need to push the underlings off the top of the climby thing to get by. What were they supposed to do? Wait in line like a commoner child?
Since your release in 1950, you may have assumed fascism was dead, but you need only look around this lot of tyrant tots and their proud parents to see that not everyone absorbed your line about all creatures being free. While the parents at the top of the proverbial turtle heap discuss mind-body connections and preschool plans on the shady benches, I’m down the throne on the broiling-hot-covered-in-bird-shit bench, wiping sand out of my crying child’s eyes with the bottom of my T-shirt. The mother of the kid who threw the abrasive debris into my son’s face shrugs to me from afar and calls out, “She loves to throw sand!”
Fuckin’ Yertles.
That’s why I’m so happy to see you. If this new mom friend believes in you the way I do, if we can somehow manage to disconnect that dude’s Bluetooth and wake Margaritaville grandma up, I think together we could start a revolution, not unlike the one in the pond of Sala-ma-sond. If all of the “little” people get “a little bit mad,” we can defeat the dictatorship going on over by the teeter-totter, the judgment of our snacks, and the unabashed direct sales pitches. I say we rise up and shake this throne!
Who’s with Me?
FICTION—Bradbury, Ray
—Science Fiction
—… Or Is It?
Dear Fahrenheit 451,
Don’t ever change. And stay here with us, always. You were created in a library, and I’m comforted by the fact that you’ll remain on library shelves around the world. If we ever get to a point when you’re not included in the core of a book collection, we’re all fucked. Like “Our civilization is flinging itself to pieces. Stand back from the centrifuge” type fucked. Some days the world feels closer to that point than I’m comfortable with.
Be glad you have a voice but no eyes. Since 1953, the talking walls are bigger and louder than ever. The modern-day “firefighters” are armed not with kerosene but snarky Internet memes, reality TV, and the ability to simultaneously see more and less of the world around them. I shouldn’t even tell you, but there are people who don’t believe libraries are necessary anymore. A bunch of Captain Beattys. It’s frightening.
Oh I know what you’ll say: “We need to be really bothered once in a while. How long is it since you were really bothered? About something important, about something real?” You’re right. That old noodge Ignorance plodding too close behind with its hot dumb breath on your neck can help up your game.
The library is a good gig to have—convincing people that I want to help them with literally WHATEVER they want to learn about. Helping create more “examiners, critics, knowers.” But it’s harder than it might seem to get people to listen.
Maybe it would be easier if we were allowed to yell? The public librarian has been typecast. We’re supposed to whisper and shush, demand silence, when in reality we work our asses off trying to help people speak up. Maybe it seems safer for us to whisper. Because maybe if we could shout, it would shake the walls down.
For now I’ll take it step by step: test-prep book by car repair manual by “Can you help me apply for this job?” One phone number for a shelter, one kid psyched to be handed the next Percy Jackson book, one woman with no one to lean on who needs a divorce guide, a new e-mail account, a Small Business for Dummies, and an encouraging smile. One book, one patron, one desk shift at a time.
I’ll be quiet about it, like you, just sitting on the shelf, waiting for someone to come to you with a question she or he doesn’t quite know how to ask yet. “In the silence, our stage whisper might carry,” right? But don’t ever go. We’re in this business together.
It Was a Pleasure to Learn,
FICTION—García Márquez, Gabriel
—Love ’Em and Lepers
Dear Of Love and Other Demons,
I did something sort of rash the other day, and now I see you’re on the reshelving cart, so soon after you were checked out. I just want to tell you, you didn’t do anything wrong; it’s all my fault.
It’s my job to match books to readers. You go out often enough. You certainly have your own adoring crowd among your author’s completionists, and there was really no reason for me to send you out on this particular assignment. But I did it anyway, and I’m sorry. I hope once you see the situation, you’ll not take things personally—book-a-sally—booknally? Whatever. I’ll start from the beginning.
A lady came in whom I know to be a fan of paperback historical romances. And she was going on about the last book she’d read, Captive Innocence by Fern Michaels, which is about a Puritan New England beauty who travels to Brazil and falls in love with her neighbor who is also her worst enemy. Then this reader, she asked me if I knew of any other historical romances set in South America. And this little voice in my head was like, “Do it.”
Did I know that a devoted Fern Michaels fan was perhaps not the best audience for a book about how a seventeenth-century tween who is bitten by a rabid dog and the priest who visits her in her jail cell/torture chamber fall in love? Yes, I confess I did. Could I have reasonably assumed that your first few pages, which mention crypts, slobbering beasts, tortured slaves, and disfigured dead bodies washing up on shorelines, might dissuade this particular reader from reading 120-odd pages further to the part where the twelve-year-old, now believed to be possessed, and the priest finally kiss after a scene where he lovingly kills her lice? Guilty as charged.
Except a little voice was goading me: She said she wanted a historical romance set in Latin America, didn’t she? Just don’t bring up the lepers. It’ll be fiiiiiinnnnnne.
I guess I really wanted to “wow” my reader. If she was g
oing to stick her toes in the Latino fiction waters, why not shove her into the deep end? A more practical librarian might have introduced her to Laura Esquivel’s Like Water for Chocolate, then the beguiling work of Isabel Allende. Step by step. Maybe it was the sugar high from the Costco cake in the break room, but I wanted to take her all the way.
She returned you after two days. That doesn’t mean anything—you’re a short book. But now she won’t make eye contact with me.
I don’t want you to take the blame for this. You are obviously a beautifully written book and a stirring tale about romance among filth and isolation. You’re passionate and funny and tragic, and your hero, the priest, crawls through a sewer to see his beloved after being condemned to a lifetime of serving lepers. That’s love, man.
It just wasn’t your time with that reader. There will be others, of course. But for now, it’s back to the shelf for you.
Adiós, Mi Amor,
MEDICINE—HEALTH AND HYGIENE—HYGIENE OF OFFSPRING—Schwartz, Bob
—God, Swear To
—Those Are the Real Subject Headings I Found This Book Under
Dear The One-Hour Orgasm,
