Book shelves series #17, seventeenth Sunday of 2012.
Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Steinbeck, Camus, Nabokov, Celine, Kafka.
Jonathan Littell’s The Kindly Ones with Revere movie camera as bookend. Littell’s lurid, bizarre book is only shelved here temporarily (he’s in too-rarefied company, perhaps).
A friend gave me this in high school.
I love to think about the books we keep and why we do. You say a friend gave you that book in high school and I bet you remember that day and everything. I should go through my books and see where they all came from and how they got to me. :) Thanks for the inspiration today.
He inscribed it too, which helps me to remember of course . . .
Well that’s awesome. I love buying used books and finding the names of their previous owners. :)
Inscriptions. I don’t know if it’s still there—this was a few years ago—but at the main library in downtown Jacksonville, I came across a jacketless, first-edition copy of Pynchon’s V. In the blank pages at the front of the book, someone had scribbled some neurotic, pseudo-intellectual ramblings about his/her life. The only thing I clearly remember about it now was a passing reference to the Chemical Brothers.
