I haven’t posted a Quotable in a while, but this came to me by email, and I really wanted to share it.

Book bloggers take a lot of crap sometimes. We’re amateurs, we’re cliquish, we don’t have the education or background to truly evaluate….you get the picture. The fact is, we are generally people who love to read and who really love to share that with other people. We like to talk about what we’ve read, and we like to read about what other people have read. We like to hang out with other people who like to read. We like to give away books and we like to win books and (perhaps most important) we buy books — a LOT of books. You would think that authors would love us, but some can be pretty disparaging. But not Frank Delaney:

9). How strong is the pulse of literary fiction, criticism and serious examination of literature in the 21st century? Who are today’s shining literary lights?

Great question! People have been saying for generations, “Oh, the novel is dead.” Well, it ain’t – nor is that wonderful American invention, creative nonfiction, nor is biography, nor is political writing. And as well as the books, the commentariat is alive and well. In fact, there’s an argument to be made that it’s healthier than ever, because we now have this wonderful new creature, the Literary Blogger. I’m a massive fan of this gorgeous animal, with all its fur and feathers – for a number of reasons. My main complaint about the general direction of literary criticism over the last century has been – and Joyce is a case in point – that it tended, in its lofty tone and often impenetrable language (not to mention occasional vendetta behavior), to be antidemocratic, to keep certain areas of literature to itself, whereas my own passion is for as many people as possible to be reading as widely as possible. The Literary Bloggers have no axes to grind, they’re not protecting their reputations, they don’t fear being sneered at by other critics, they’re reading what they want to read, writing what they want to write, and they don’t want to keep what they enjoy to themselves. They want to share. They want to expand the constituency of reading. They want to hail and applaud good writing. To my mind this is a very significant development – uneven, I grant, here and there, but, dammit, not as uneven as the generations of formal literary critics, and the blogging intention is so good and so worthy of loud vocal support that you can call it truly a new and, to my mind, incomparably welcome development in the world of reading and writing.

Author Frank Delaney, in an interview with the Tribune

What’s more important when you visit a bookstore: finding the book you were looking for, or finding some treasure on a back shelf or mis-shelved in the wrong area? Both of those are extremely satisfying, but there is something special about finding a hidden treasure, especially in a used bookstore:

“Some people don’t like too much order in bookshops and want to feel like they’re finding something. You can have 300,000 books perfectly arranged on the shelf, and every time, people will walk in and want to look at the books stacked up on the floor. So if you really want to sell something, jumble it up and pitch it on the floor.”

Have you ever had someone suggest that you get rid of your books? I’m always sort of shocked to find that some people don’t understand the simple joy of having books on the shelves. It doesn’t matter whether or not I’ve read them – just having them at hand is a wonderful feeling.

“Books can be passed around. They can be shared. A lot of people like seeing them in their houses. They are memories. People who don’t understand books don’t understand this. They learn from TV shows about organizing that you should get rid of the books that you aren’t reading, but everyone who loves books believes the opposite. People who love books keep them around, like photos, to remind them of a great experience and so they can revisit and say, ‘Wow, this is a really great book.’ ”

I’m sure that as time passes, more and more of our books will be electronic. It makes me sad, because there are some things about snuggling up with a good book that a Nook or a Kindle can’t replace, no matter how convenient they are. Apparently, Mark O’Connell feels the same way:

“I don’t look forward to a future in which my Kindle (or whatever device inevitably succeeds it) is the only book on the shelf. But it’s a future I’m fairly convinced is awaiting us, and it’s one that I, as a consumer, am playing my part in advancing us toward… But then I realize that the thing is just too useful, too crazily convenient a tool to not embrace. And then I tell myself that it’s not possible, anyway, to shelve the advance of technology, and that history is filled with examples of beautiful things being supplanted by more efficient versions of those things. Ultimately, you’re never going to win an argument against convenience, no matter how much you love the anachronistic, heavy, unwieldy, and beautiful thing you want to save.”

And that’s really true, isn’t it? Food may not taste as great when it’s cooked in the microwave, but it’s too convenient not to use it sometimes. But there is something special about the smell of something in the oven or simmering on the stove, and we give that up for the sake of convenience.

Mark O’Connell is a staff writer for The Millions. He is a writer and academic who lives in Dublin, Ireland. His website is www.markoconnell.net.  This quote came to me by way of Shelf Awareness.

This quotable describes the situation at my house!

Jon Carroll in the San Francisco Chronicle, on getting rid of books:

“I made a discovery about the immutable nature of books. You can get rid of all the books you want, but you will still have the same number of books in your house. This would seem to be a mathematical impossibility, but experience suggests it’s how the world really works.”

You know, looking around, he may be wrong. It seems that every time I get rid of books, I end up with more. Does that ever happen to you?

I was talking with a friend the other day about books that you read when you’re young and re-read when you are older, and it made me think of this quote:

“A truly great book should be read in youth, again in maturity and once more in old age, as a fine building should be seen by morning light, at noon and by moonlight.”

Robertson Davies

There are books that I read when I was young — such as classics that I was assigned in school — that I was really too young to appreciate.   Then there are books that seemed deep and meaningful when I was young that, when I’ve re-read them years later, are just drivel. And, of course, there are the books that have held up over time. I am quite certain that years from now, I will re-read them and they will still speak to me.

A great example is Frankenstein, which I read as a teen. I was caught up in the horror story of it all, having seen various Frankenstein movies. When I read it years later, in college, I was moved by the monster’s loneliness and by its attempts to educate itself and find meaning for his life. Perhaps different aspects of the story will appeal to me as an older reader.

Robertson Davies is a well-known Canadian novelist.  His best-known work is The Fifth Business, published in 1970.

This is an interesting perspective on books, writing and readers:

“A writer only begins a book. A reader finishes it.”

Samuel Johnson

That’s true in many ways — a book isn’t really finished until someone reads it. At the same time, I know I’m not the only one who reads a lot into what happens after the final paragraph. And a good book lives on in your mind and you carry the characters with you.

Samuel Johnson was a writer, a poet, a lexicographer, a literary critic and one of the most distinguished men of letters in English history.

This is an interesting bit of a quote, and one I agree with wholeheartedly:

Never judge a book by its movie.

J. W. Eagan

I do hate it when they take a great book and turn it into an awful movie. They’ve done it to any number of Stephen King’s horror novels (say what you will about King, he can scare the pants off a reader!). There are so many examples that I am always wary of seeing the movie adaptation of a book I loved. I waffled about seeing Winter’s Bone (I eventually did and enjoyed it) and I skipped The Road even though I love Viggo Mortensen – the book was just wrenching, but I can’t imagine the movie having the same impact.)

Sadly, I can’t find a bit of information about Eagan – I’d like to know whether he was in the book business or the movie business.

Today’s Quotable compares books and television.  The fact is, I love them both – there are some great things on TV. But a TV show will never give you the same internal life that a book will. It’s all spelled out for you, it all happens in your eyes and ears; not enough happens in your head. Like a movie made from a book, it is someone else’s vision, and it never seems to match mine precisely.

The smallest bookstore still contains more ideas of worth than have been presented in the entire history of television.  ~Andrew Ross

There are several famous fellows named Andrew Ross, but the only one Wikipedia lists who is not a rugby or soccer player is Andrew Ross, professor of social and cultural analysis at NYU.

I’m always curious about people who love a book I hate, and vice versa. What do they see that I didn’t? Why did something speak to them when it didn’t even whisper to me? I think this quote, from Angela Carter, prolific English novelist and journalist, might explain some of it:

“Reading a book is like re-writing it for yourself. You bring to a novel, anything you read, all your experience of the world. You bring your history and you read it in your own terms.”

That is so true – you really do bring all of your history, other things you’ve read on the subject, the things that have happened to you and the people you know to each book you read.