Photography by Elizabeth Renzetti
When I set out on my walk, I hadn’t expected to find Bertrand Russell and Judith Krantz curled up together. But there they were, the philosopher-mathematician and the queen of the bonkbuster, cheek by jowl, in a free curbside library. Cover to cover. So I took them home.
I’ve spent the summer reading books I find at little libraries, those treasure boxes that have sprung up in front of people’s houses around the world. Tired of the tyranny of algorithms and data points, I was drawn to their beautiful chaos. I wanted to see what I could learn from their contents. I found some pretty wild things, including the guest book from a funeral. I also found knowledge, sometimes trivial and sometimes quite profound, but always unexpected.
I learned, for example, that Bertrand Russell has more in common with Judith Krantz than you might expect. I have always adored Ms. Krantz’s novels, though it must be said that the one stowed in the little library, 1990′s Dazzle, is not among her chefs d’oeuvre. Set in California in the 1980s, it tells the story of the impossibly beautiful (of course) photographer Jazz Kilkullen, who name-drops with abandon: After all, “she’d photographed Stallone and Streisand together for Rolling Stone.”
But this fame-tagging is nothing compared with the second volume of Lord Russell’s memoirs, which covers the interwar period. As he sits in London, contemplating the coming carnage of the First World War, T.S. Eliot is in the spare bedroom, asking for money. Ludwig Wittgenstein sends moany letters from Austria, complaining about the local peasants. Lord Russell spends much of his time keeping his famous mistresses apart.
And the bitchiness! It’s hard to declare a winner between the woman who popularized the sex-and-shopping novel and the man who popularized analytic philosophy. When Ms. Krantz tells us that a character “looked like a biker’s wet dream, yet could never be mistaken for a slut,” Lord Russell says hold my claret. His memoirs display an inexplicably deep-seated animosity toward D.H. Lawrence, for instance: “His excessive emphasis on sex was due to the fact that in sex alone he was compelled to admit that he was not the only human being in the universe.”
Everything is connected, I tell you. Would I have known this if I hadn’t spent the past couple of months pillaging the random contents of Toronto’s little libraries, picking up books I’d otherwise never read? Possibly not. My brain had atomized during this year of conflagrations. Some mysteries would remain unanswered. I would never know, for instance, how Lord Russell and Ms. Krantz ended up stranded together on this island of lost books.
One theme occurred over and over, a depressing motif: The failures of the past live in the present.
I read Atul Gawande’s Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End through a veil of tears, alternating between its bittersweet pages and news about the ways we had tortured the institutionalized elderly during this pandemic. Dr. Gawande’s message is deceptively simple: We are no less human and valuable at the end of our lives than we are at the beginning. So why do we sacrifice our elders in the name of profit?
“You’d think people would have rebelled,” he writes. “You’d think we would have burned the nursing homes to the ground.” To our great discredit, we have not. And we show no signs of such radical bravery in the near future. But at least Dr. Gawande offers real-life models where aging humans can live as humans. It’s all we want. “The battle of being mortal is the battle to maintain the integrity of one’s life – to avoid becoming so diminished or dissipated or subjugated that who you are becomes disconnected from who you were or who you want to be.”
I highlighted that quote in lipstick, because I was sitting on a subway with no pen. So many of the books I found in little libraries were similarly scarred with use, and these were my favourites. At the outset I’d worried that I might stumble across one of the books I’d written, and that this would be a sign of rejection, but I realized the opposite was true. These were books that had been loved nearly to death, thick romances with dog-eared corners and thrillers with their covers half off. I came to see them not as books that people want to throw away, but as treasures they were willing to share.
Occasionally something would be hidden inside a book, something once important to someone. In Lord Russell’s memoir was a yellowed slip of paper, its pencilled lines of French faint to the point of invisibility. I pictured the mystery writer sitting in a café with a pernod, trying to decide if she was on Lord Russell’s side or DH Lawrence’s, silently willing Wittgenstein to just get on with it.
When I picked up Jehane Benoît’s Encyclopedia of Canadian Cooking – “Over 400,000 copies sold in hardcover” – a gold ticket fluttered from its pages, announcing a 1988 New Year’s Eve dance at the Japanese Canadian Cultural Centre. I imagined a menu popping with the fusion cuisine of that decade, a kiwi pavlova for dessert perhaps. There would have been no place for Ms. Benoît’s rib-sticking daubes and loafs, her braised beef heart and lamb tongue poulette (a dish that requires one cup of something called tongue broth).
Ms. Benoît was once a giant of cookery, and I’m sad that her tightly written little book, published in 1970, has been overshadowed by gloriously photographed food-porn cookbooks purchased by people who don’t cook. The only picture is on the cover, where Ms. Benoît is showing a piece of meat who’s the boss. The Encyclopedia is full of wisdom: Beauty paste – essentially a mixture of lard and dried mustard – will improve any roasted meat, while rice “is excellent for bowel disturbances.” One should not smoke for 30 minutes before a meal.
I brought a bowl of Ms. Benoît’s sour cream cucumbers to a party where a group of writer friends were gathered. I told them, guiltily, about my little libraries project, and it felt a bit like telling a group of dentists that you’ve decided to pull your own molars. I’m used to buying books, not reading them for free. To not buy books is to push an already precarious profession a little closer to the edge. But they all understood. Every writer is a book lover, too. Every one of them loved a library – either the brick institution or the ramshackle box on a pole at the end of the lawn.
Not all of the collections I plundered belonged to the official Little Free Library network (a U.S.-based non-profit that requires participants to pay for a registry), but each one was unique in its glorious oddity. Inside I’d find abandoned teddy bears, home-recorded reggae CDs, abandoned tech manuals, as if someone might actually want a guide to the advanced features of Windows 95. The funeral visitor’s book stopped me cold: How had it ended up there? All I could think was that the person who owned it had moved, or died, and the inheritors couldn’t bear to throw it away.
Mostly I took home books (I also donated many in return). I revelled in the freedom of my reading experiment. I was liberated from the marketing push that sent the latest domestic thriller my way, the algorithm that says “you’ll love this!”, the magazine profiles of the same three memoirists. So many books are published, and most of them get lost. Many of the books I came across were well-loved paperbacks, but many others seemed like Linus’s Christmas tree, shunned and forsaken. I felt like I was sheltering the orphans for a little bit.
Along the way, I uncovered a bizarre assortment of facts, which I will use to bore people at parties, if there are ever parties again. In The Way of the Wiseguy, Donnie Brasco (the pen name of undercover FBI agent Joseph Pistone) reveals that the cash bribe you give to a mobster is called a busta, which is the same word – Italian for envelope – for the money you give a couple at an Italian wedding. Who knew? I mean wise guys knew, but who else?
I found an even more intriguing tidbit buried in Dick Grote’s Discipline Without Punishment, which to my disappointment was a management manual and not an erotic thriller. When Mr. Grote arrived as a training executive at Frito-Lay in the 1970s, he was confronted by a barrage of customer complaints. “Each complaint revealed the same bizarre problem: obscene messages written on the chips.”
I put the book down and laughed for about five minutes when I read that. Not all heroes wear capes, as the kids say. I imagined the workers stealthily scrawling the f word on each Dorito, taking their revenge on a system that exploited them. And then I thought about how bad conditions are to this day at the Frito-Lay plant in Kansas, where workers have been on strike for weeks because conditions are so dire they’re reportedly told to work around people who have died on the shift. They probably don’t even have time to scrawl swear words on chips any more.
The more I thought about it, the less funny it seemed. This was my problem: I’d be enjoying something arcane and interesting and then our doom-laden present would encroach, a cloud passing over the sun. I raced through Anthony Boutard’s Beautiful Corn: America’s Original Grain from Seed to Plate, marvelling that my favourite vegetable was in fact a species of grass, and trying to not to wince at the fact that the edible bit is called the “starchy endosperm” (who knew!).
“In its traditional form, it is the greatest wonder of the world,” Mr. Boutard writes, but corn is the victim of modern industrial farming and profit-seeking (I’ll bet the workers at Frito-Lay are nodding their heads.) “Once viewed as a gift from the gods, corn has slipped under a cloud, a victim of modernity’s prodigal and detached ways.” Shortly after I read this, I came across a story in The New York Times that blamed short-sighted agricultural planning for Germany’s calamitous floods, at least in part. You may have guessed what comes next: “Fields of sweet corn are cultivated for cheap animal feed,” the Times story reported, “but they retain much less water than grassland.”
Everything is connected: That became clearer the more I read, or perhaps I was just eager to see the connections. A few days apart, I picked up Jennifer Egan’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel A Visit from the Goon Squad, a book I had always wanted to read, and Michael Crichton’s State of Fear, a thriller I thought I’d enjoy (spoiler alert: I did not). I thought I’d spend a few days lost in fictional worlds, not confronted by two very different versions of the future.
Keep in mind that while I was reading, parts of Western Canada and the U.S., Siberia and Turkey were being devastated with wildfires; Germany, China and Taiwan were flooding. The environmental disasters of the world are the work of our hands. But not in the world of State of Fear: The late Mr. Crichton’s 2004 novel is a turgid diatribe against environmentalists, who are the book’s villains. There’s even a wimpy liberal actor who gets eaten by cannibals, a fate only slightly worse than having to read State of Fear. I wanted to apologize to every tree that had to die for this garbage.
Ms. Egan’s novel, which was published in 2010 and carries the weight of 9/11 in every page, takes a different view of the future. In its Manhattan, trees bloom in January and only old people use the word “viral.” A wall has been built along the Hudson River, presumably to guard against flooding, and in typical New York style it’s become a fashionable place to watch the sunset. Part of the novel’s brilliance is the way it presents human striving in the face of the universe’s indifference as valiant rather than pathetic. The dismal Manhattan of the future is experiencing a baby boom. Ms. Egan writes, “An army of children: the incarnation of faith in those who weren’t aware of having any left.”
One day, as my experiment was coming to an end, I called an old friend who’s also a writer. We spent time talking about why we continue to write books, despite all possible evidence that it’s an idiotic and money-losing enterprise (this is one of a short list of subjects writers are allowed to talk about, which also includes: other people’s advances, the lies of bestseller lists and the godliness of booksellers.)
I told her about my little libraries project, and assured her that I hadn’t seen any of her books in my travels. I said, “You know, it was actually quite heartening.”
“Uh-huh,” she answered distractedly. I think she may have been scanning Amazon’s bestseller list, which is only full of lies if your book isn’t on it.
I said, “I’ve come to think of books not so much as books as seeds.”
There was silence on the other end of the line, probably because she didn’t want to say, “I can’t live on seeds, I’m not a pigeon.”
“No, really. Think about it. Every book is a seed. Let’s say a book doesn’t do very well, fine – that sucks. But it’s still planted in the head of everyone who does read it. Even if they just remember one line, maybe they’ll repeat it to someone at a party. So the seed gets passed on.”
We agreed that obviously it’s better if the seed gets passed on, and lots of people buy your book. Then we moved on to more cheerful topics, like the fact that the cheese at book launches is always terrible but we miss it anyway.
I’m going to go back to reading new books for a while. I’ll put some of the ones I borrowed back in other libraries. But so much will stay with me: Ms. Egan’s line about children representing faith in the future and Dr. Gawande’s hope for the elderly and Mr. Boutard’s devotion to corn. They’ll outlast this summer of stray books.
Every book is a seed. We just have to pass them on.
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The summer in books, revisited
If you’re scouring your local free library, bring along our guide of the 40 hot summer reads of 2021. And if you have one of these books, consider passing it on to your community.
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