Last week I found a first edition of City of God, written by E.L. Doctorow, at Goodwill. I paid a $1.99 for this great find, but only God knows how the book found its way to Goodwill. That, as they say, is another mystery.
Back in the early 1990s, I began reading and collecting books written by E.L. Doctorow (Edgar Lawrence)--a writer who is largely considered one of the best American novelists of the last century. Less a few titles, I do have most of his work on my shelves, including two of his works that are often placed in the top 100 novels of the past 100 years: Ragtime and The Book of Daniel. I have also read The Waterworks, Loon Lake, and Lives of the Poets (a short story collection).
Doctorow has slowed in his writing as he's entered his latter years, but anything he publishes commands attention and usually wins an honor or two.
Along with John Updike, Bernard Malamud, John Irving, David Sedaris, and Barbara Kingsolver--E.L., like them, occupies a copious amount of my shelf space, and I have their various titles stacked up like chord wood in the library.
Now and again, whenever Becky complains about the books, I just remind her that I do dust them every decade (and do, sometimes, downsize the stacks by selling to Half-Priced Books). "Still," she says, "you usually buy more books with the money you get from the sales."
I'm not sure that's the objective, but I did read this week in The New Yorker about Otto Penzler (series editor of The Best American Mystery Stories each year) and a guy who owns The Mysterious Bookshop in New York. After nearly sixty years of collecting books, he eventually added on to his house. He lives in one room, and the rest of his space, thousands of square feet, is filled to the brim with volumes. Every morning, when he rises, he says to himself, "Good Lord! I actually live here!"
"You see," I tell the good wife, "I have a long way to go before I get that bad!"
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