Cracking the Spine

Rob Kelley here, thinking about a writer’s reverence for books, at least this writer’s particular reverence.

Reading for me was the ultimate escape when I was a kid (still is!), and I would spend hours sitting on my bed devouring whatever I could get my hands on. I was the kid whose parents yelled to “go outside and get some sun,” and tried to find ways to stay off their radar, searching for a reading nook they didn’t yet know about.

Every year for my birthday I always asked for the same present: a gift certificate to the bookstore in our local mall. I would ration that thing hard, seeing how many books I could get out of $30. I also found used bookstores, little storefronts with bowed pine shelves packed with old pulp paperbacks (Science Fiction was my go-to genre then), adding 50 cent paperbacks to my collection, their pages yellow, their spines often cracked, pages loose in the binding.

That was fine, but I was never going to let that happen to my books. I’d take care not to open the fattest SF or Fantasy epic too widely when I read, so as not to leave even a crease on their cheap paper spines.

I brought my small collection with me to college, the books stacked and taking up precious dorm room space much to the confusion of my fellow engineering students. But college brought new used paperback stores and more books to add to the collection.

Then graduate school in English, and a new challenge: my assigned reading burden went through the roof. All the sudden I was devouring hundreds of books a year and I had to break one of the cardinal rules I had for myself: never write in a book.

I never wrote in textbooks if I could help it, certainly never defaced any of the fiction in my library. But fiction titles now were my textbooks, and I’d need to be able to scan and remember what I’d thought was important later. Plus, frankly, if you didn’t write down what you thought Joyce was actually saying when reading Ulysses, you’d never remember it when you returned to the passage.

After grad school I continued to collect books, and in a sign that we thought our marriage would probably last, Margot Anne Kelley and I finally combined our libraries. What that meant was that we had to periodically purge our collection (because, alas, Jorge Luis Borges’ “The Library of Babel” is fiction; in our reality we kept running out of room). That had unexpected repercussions, including selling Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower to a local used bookstore, only to unknowingly buy my own copy back a few months later when I wanted to read it again. And buying multiple copies of the same book that I was sure I didn’t already own? Yeah, that too.

But despite my absolute reverence for books, two things about my book habits have changed. First, I began to take my own writing seriously. And as many of us have discovered, that changes the experience of reading significantly. Instead of marking in books, now I keep a reading log of everything I read, including what I’m finding fascinating from a writerly perspective: scenes structures that knock me out, descriptions that are breathtaking, characters that inspire me to do better with my own. And have I given away a book that I logged only to find that I need to see that text again to better recall what I appreciated? Yep. I just did that with Tom Clancy’s Patriot Games, wanting to see the detail of a particular scene at the climax of the book.

The other thing that has changed for me is taking up piano. I’m still very much a beginner, so determining fingering and phrasing is part of my discipline. I started by scanning and printing out my scores so I could mark them up. Then my teacher showed me his scores, highly marked up, sometimes with erasures and remarking. And, in a moment of great personal growth, he got me to break the spines of the books, so they lay flat on the music desk on the piano. That one took some real effort to get over, but now I break the spines and mark up my sheet music.

But only in pencil, of course.