For the book lovers on your gift list, Martha recommends, Library: An Unquiet History, by Matthew Battles. For younger readers, Grant suggests C.S. Lewis’ Chronicles of Narnia series, starting with The Magician’s Nephew. For adults who loved the Narnia books, he also recommends Lev Grossman’s The Magicians. This is part of a complete episode.
Transcript of “Martha and Grant’s Recommendations for Book Lovers”
You’re listening to A Way with Words, the show about language and how we use it. I’m Grant Barrett.
And I’m Martha Barnette, and this is the show where we make some recommendations about some books you might want to give as gifts.
The one that I’m reading right now that I’m really enjoying is called Library and Unquiet History by Matthew Battles. It was published a few years ago, but it was just reissued with a new afterword.
I would describe it as sort of a portrait of libraries throughout history, a biography of the library. It’s this beautifully evocative description of libraries from as far back as Alexandria in Egypt, the Jewish library in the Vilna ghetto during World War II, to the great British Museum Library today. It’s just sort of a gorgeous evocation of what libraries themselves are like.
As I said, a kind of a portrait. And he talks in very poetic language about the physicality of libraries in a way that I really like. He has worked at the Harvard Widener Library. And listen to this description of what a library is like there during a semester.
He says, the people who shelve the books in the Widener talk about the library’s breathing. At the start of the term, the stacks exhale books in great swirling clouds. At the end of term, the library inhales and the books fly back.
Oh, nice. You know what I’m talking about, right? One more passage I have to share with you that I know you’ll appreciate because it’s just really sensuous. He’s talking about being in a library and the contradictions that you face, just the feeling of being in a library.
He says, as the reader gropes the stacks, lifting books and testing their heft, appraising the fall of letter forms on the title page, scrutinizing marks left by other readers, the more elusive knowledge itself becomes. All that remains unknown seems to beckon from among the covers, between the lines.
In the library, the reader is wakened from the dream of communion with a single book, startled into a recognition of the words’ materiality by the sheer number of bound volumes, by the sound of pages turning, covers rubbing, by the rank smell of books gathered together in vast numbers.
Of course, the experience of the physicality of the book is strongest in the large libraries, where the accumulated weight of written words seems to exert a gravity all its own. You know that feeling, Grant, when you’re in a library and you hear people reading all around you and turning those pages, and you just think, there is no way I’ll ever read all of these books.
No, impossible. I could stand here and not absorb it, right? Yes. Stand here and feel it, but I couldn’t stand here and have it all. Yeah, and it’s such a mix of feelings. You’ve got access to so much, but you’re human and finite, and you’ll never be able to embrace all of that.
What’s the book again? The book again is called Library and Unquiet History by Matthew Battles. Sounds fantastic.
I have two book series to recommend, and they’re connected in a way. In my house, we have started reading with my son the C.S. Lewis books, The Narnia Chronicles.
Okay, he’s nine now? He’s eight and a half. He’ll be nine next year. Okay. And what we’ve done is started chronologically with the story. So we didn’t read them in the order they were published. We read them in the order of the events inside the book.
So we started with The Magician’s Nephew. And this is about a young boy named Diggory and his friend Polly. And they make it to another world. And they have adventures. They meet Aslan the lion. And a whole bunch of things happen. And we’re going to move on to The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, which is the one that most people know. And we’ll read the rest of the books in the series, too.
Now, these are all published in the 1950s. They have a little bit of the tinge of the era, but I think that they hold up remarkably well. And then the series that I want to connect them to, because I think I see a strong inspiration there, is the adult series The Magicians by Lev Grossman.
And these books, too, have people leaving the real world and going to the magical world through magical means. And they also involve a little bit of kind of a dark version of Hogwarts, where they go to a school called Breakbills. And stuff is a little more pedestrian, a little more tedious, a little more ordinary, but yet still magical.
And these are obviously really adult books. They have adult language and adult themes, adult situations. But the parallels there and even the allegories there between the two series are so strong that I think that any adult that enjoyed the Narnia books as a child would really enjoy the Magician books by Lev Grossman as an adult.
Anyway, so that’s Lev Grossman’s series, The Magicians. There’s, I think, three or four books now. And also C.S. Lewis’ The Narnia Chronicles.
What book has grabbed you lately? We’d love to hear about it. You can email us at words@waywordradio.org or give us a call. That number is 877-929-9673. If you can’t wait to talk with us, we have a very active Facebook group, and you can always hit us up on Twitter at Wayword.
