Two men enter the store. Tattoos visible on one, scraggly beards on both, a hint of a scowl. A part of my brain, coaxed by the world into suspicion, wonders if they are entering the store to rail against books with LGBQT+ characters, minorities, Howard Zinn. These are men that I can picture having not read a book since they were forced to in school, and maybe not even then, despite being in what I’d assume to be an above-average reading zip code in Chicago. They evoke internet forums, the kind with pipelines, which lead to a whole bunch of society’s ills, at least the variety that makes for perfect Substack fodder.
Instead, they go to to the Sci-Fi section. One recommends Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir to the other, the book I happen to be reading at the time. Soon, they’re pitching books to each other, and I’m chiming in. The taller of the two mentions having lived in Norway, alludes to the fact that he speaks some Norwegian. They are perfectly pleasant people, these two men, clearly thoughtful, into a variety of literature, travel.
The world I assumed I’ve been living in is informed by what I do in my other job (this one, kind of), in which I stare at a computer screen and click around on the internet until I get a good enough idea to jot down, until I focus my energy away from the terrible world of the screen and return to tinkering with words. As anyone who’s spent even a little time online knows, there’s a direct correlation between being on the internet and thinking the world is a terrible place. Which isn’t to say that it’s only terrible because of the internet, buuuut, if you spend all your time in the ocean you’re going to think everything is wet.
In the few months since I started working at the bookstore, people have asked me about my new job and several have made the easy joke, “People still read?”
And yes, the joke is ridiculous because it shows more about the asker’s exposure to the world than the state of the world itself. While it’s a bit of a knife-twist every time I hear it, every time I force the chuckle and say, “We’re out there,” it’s also easy to laugh off. I’m someone who’s in book clubs, who works in the book world, I exist within a bubble of people who enjoy reading more than the average American population. But it’s also a perfectly fair question given…you know, the world. The world which my job on a computer constantly reminds me of.
But when I step in the doors of the bookstore—and remember to stop judging people right away—I am entering a new world. One where everyone reads, or nearly so.
I tend to come back happy from my three or four hour shifts. Not just because my main source of income—and now my secondary source of income—still comes from people buying books. It’s not because I merely like the idea of people reading books; it’s quite crucial to my worldview.
My writing career currently rests in the limbo searching for a new deadline, necessitating more work, more ideas, more pitches, more side gigs, all of which sends me back here to the computer screen, and its pathway to the world of the internet. This, at the same time as fatherhood, especially stay-at-home-dadhood, has shifted my schedule and made time a scarcer commodity. These two coinciding factors, coupled with the financial strain they each incur, have limited my opportunities for socialization with all those people I’ve been fortunate enough to surround myself by; people who read books, or are otherwise thoughtful human beings, and who have helped bring balance to my perspective for the past 12 years of being an author, and thus the past decade and a half or so of getting splashed by the internet every day. If that metaphor is tracking.
The argument could surely be made that the world in the past 15 years has grown darker, thus making the need for some world-balancing to be felt more acutely, regardless of what’s been going on in my life, or what percentage of my time is spent on the internet. But that’s really a moot point, or at least one I don’t care to explore right this second.
At the bookstore where I’ve worked for the past few months, I’m now surrounded by strangers who read. Toddlers excited to rush into the children’s section and pick out a book. Teenagers and college kids, this generation we worry is so engrossed in their phones, they come in with nary a glance at their devices, eager for recommendations, eager for the newest graphic novel, the latest installment in their favorite series. In just a couple of months I’ve overheard twenty somethings that were more well-read than plenty of sixty-year-olds wringing their hands about the youth.
My small talk with coworkers invariably veers toward the question, “what are you reading?” which yields much more interesting conversations than society’s usual array of pleasantries with strangers and acquaintances. It’s not necessarily because it’s a more thoughtful question. It’d be easy to answer it superficially, and often the conversation does stop at a title, a synopsis. But I find that more often than not, it ends up being a thoughtful discussion. On the content of the book, or some tangential topic. A discussion on the latest fad genre, on how capitalism and machismo killed the Edmund Fitzgerald, some recollection of a book we read in high school, a confession about what we were like then, some revelation of who we are.
Strange, unearned intimacy perhaps. But we are surrounded by books at all times. These are exercises in human thoughtfulness, four hundred pages (at the most, ideally, according to several of these conversation) of intimacy with a stranger. They represent humanity’s impulse to thoughtfulness. To examine life, unravel the many mysterious threads that make up humanity’s existence. Our virtues and our faults, our vices, our yearning for mearning, our desperation for survival, and how all these things have wound together to create the world we find ourselves in.
When you spend time immersing yourself in thoughtfulness, in, as T.H White wrote, “why the world wags and what wags it,” you can’t help but consider other beings. You care about those outside of yourself. You can see how someone else’s existence might feel, and so you try to act accordingly.
If you consider a caterpillar, for example, actually devote time to it as you might in a book, how are you not filled with wonder? How can violence or ill-intent enter your head if you have spent reading abotu or writing about a fuzzy green tube that wiggles its way up pavement searching for food or habitat we haven’t destroyed, then builds itself a cocoon where it turns itself into soup—a process which our most talented, advanced, well-funded, and, yes, thoughtful, minds still can’t figure out—only to build itself back into a new mesmerizing horrifying creature that is also in search of nature’s scant supply of food and shelter, how do you become a selfish human being after doing that?
The same applies to when you regularly spend time in another’s brain. When you expose yourself to the thoughts and brain processes of another human being. Ruminate on the grief of the world’s most renown English-language writer after losing a child for three hundred pages and you’ll be hard-pressed to not think about the precious, fragility of life. You think anyone tearing families apart or starving children has read and absorbed Hamnet?
I don’t actually know, of course. But we all get a sense that they haven’t, right?
For those few hours three times a week, I exist in an entirely different world. Or maybe not a different one, just the one that exists forgotten beneath out usual world, the one whose digital access paints a grimmer picture. Maybe it’s the simple fact that I am not generally connected to the internet during those hours, and this whole extrapolation is me overblowing what it’s like to exist in the real world.
With the caveat that there are shitty books out there who lead people to think less, or think less generously, surrounding myself in these human paragons is transporting. Not just to the many worlds on the shelves, but to a different world entirely. One in which life is more closely examined, cherished, marveled at. One in which those around me also routinely reflect. On what, it hardly matters, just that they do. Or at the very least, I assume they do. And that, it turns out, has made all the difference.
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