Here Today, Gone Tomorrow . . .

Something many people don’t know about libraries is that we are constantly ‘weeding’ our collections. There is finite space on our shelves and hundreds of books come out each month, many of which we need to buy to keep our collection current. So we weed old books that are no longer interesting, or that contain outdated information.

It’s easy to see that you can get rid of travel books that contain old prices and names of restaurants that are closed. Likewise with medical books whose information has been rendered incorrect by recent research.

One of the hardest calls to make when weeding are books that come under the subject headings ‘Presidential candidates,’ or ‘Presidential candidates – biography.’ Books about winners – Reagan, Clinton, Bush – and books about losers – Perot, Dukakis, Kerry – share equal space. During the election cycle, these are hot items; but interest in them is very short-lived. I mean, it was once a hot topic, but our copy of Unfit for Command, about whether John Kerry was a hero or a traitor in Vietnam, hasn’t been checked out since January 2005. Do we get rid of it now, or is it an important historical piece? Like Unfit for Command, many of these books are pitifully short on objectivity, so one surmises their accuracy is likewise suspect. This undermines their historical value, but what if someone is specifically researching the sort of smear campaigns that go on during American presidential campaigns?

Books on George W. Bush exemplify this trend. They range from the reverential A Charge to Keep: My Journey to the White House, written by Mr. Bush himself, to the accusatory Bush’s Brain: How Karl Rove Made George W. Bush President. Again, these are both more campaign documents than history, but do we keep them for that purpose?

Probably no candidate has engendered more irrational fear than Hillary Clinton. With titles like Extreme Makeover of Hillary (Rodham) Clinton and Can She Be Stopped?, it seems that people regard her as some sort of liberal voodoo queen. Frankly, Hillary’s not my favorite candidate out of the gate, but this kind of silliness is laughable. And again, I don’t suppose – whatever the result of the election – that anyone will be reading these books after November 2008.

So they clog our shelves, a product of our inability to judge their continued relevance. Kind of the like the people they’re written about.

Authors and Book Discussions

The other night we had a book discussion with the book’s author there. This is the second time I’ve ever been able to do this; although there are plenty of local authors, many of them write things that are not that appropriate for discussion – mysteries, thrillers, things like that. People have asked me if it’s difficult talking about a book when the author is sitting right there. I don’t think it is. Most authors like to discuss their work, and if they perceive people as serious readers, they like to hear their thoughts, even their criticisms.

The first time I had an author at a book discussion, it was Richard Burgin, and we were discussing his novel Ghost Quartet. This is a book with several unsavory characters and much reprehensible behavior. Some of the readers liked it; some simply disliked the characters too much to enjoy it. But they told Mr. Burgin these things and he talked about it with them, and even made some want to read the book again to see the things he was talking about. One person in the discussion even brought up a point that Mr. Burgin claimed no magazine or newspaper critic had ever noted – and was relieved that somebody finally said it. All in all it was one of the most interesting book discussions I have been to.

This time, we had author Scott Phillips in attendance while we discussed his novel Cottonwood. It was interesting to see the different styles of authors during a discussion. Where Richard Burgin had been quiet, even reticent during the discussion, Mr. Phillips was loquacious, and offered a good deal of insight into the editing and publishing process, and how his book had become the particular work we had before us. This prefigured the major criticism one of the group members brought up, that there seemed to be a break in the action between the first and second parts of the book. The author pointed out that in the original manuscript, there were a few hundred more pages between those two sections, with a lot more action and character development, but that the editor, leery of publishing too long a book, asked for significant cuts. I don’t think one can have better insight into a work of art than to have the author describe how it came to be what it is – the good and the bad.

I hope sometime in the future, we’ll be able to have another discussion with the author present. Have you ever been to one? How did it go?