On the Giving and Receiving of Books

I always give people books at Christmas; I almost never get books from other people on Christmas. This is fine with me; I get enough books, however they're got, that I don't especially have to count on Christmas for any kind of influx. That I have become expected as a giver of books, too, is fine with me. It is rare, I suppose, and I am lucky, I suppose, to have any sort of gift-giving nature that coincides so nicely with my larger nature; it makes a man feel nicely fixed in the universe. My brother likes dance as much as I like books, and it is not as though that translates nicely into his gift-giving life.

There are two ways you can give books, especially when the onus of getting anything else for them has sort of been vaporized away. One is the way I usually give books to my sister, which I think of as the "Time to Take Your Medicine" approach. That is where, I buy my sister not so much books that I imagine that she'll like (although I do think that she will wind up liking them), as books that I think she had better read. She probably wants to read something written for teenage girls, or read the fifth Harry Potter again, but too bad, this Christmas she got, from me, the Prime of Miss Jean Brodie. She never said anything to me that remotely suggests a desire to read the Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, but she is a girl a little older than the girls in the Brodie set, and she goes to an all-girl's school. I figure that all such people ought to read the Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, and, what with ought implying can and all, I supposed that I would do what I could at Christmastime to help her along. At the opposite of this gift-giving idea spectrum is my grandfather. I suppose that there are some books that I can imagine it behooving my grandfather to read, books that I would think best for him if really pressed on it. Like, Bartleby the Scrivener, for some reason, strikes me as a book one would benefit from particularly in retirement, or maybe one of Philip Roth's later books like the Plot Against America or Indignation, which I think would do a really good job of making someone of my grandfather's age organize his thoughts about the recently ended century. Or but whatever, I could talk for hours about the books I would get an older gentleman if I thought it were time for him to take his bookish medicine, but Pop is no such older gentleman; he needs no bookish medicine of mine. So every year I get him a book, preferably by David Halberstam, about the Yankees, and every year he reads and gives it to me and then I read it and tell him that hate them or love them, the Yankees are a worthy organization and all of that.

Pop and Lizzie are the two poles of book selection; almost all of my friends, and my mother, and brother Connor, exist between them, which is to say that I go back and forth. Last year, it was time for my mother to take the medicine, and she got Jane Eyre; this year, I got her U is for Undertow, a book about which I know nothing except that my mother has read and enjoyed all twenty of its predecessors.

Does a gift given as medicine count as a gift? Derrida, gunning hard against the long incumbent Ralph Waldo Emerson for runner-up-patron-saint of this blog, thinks not; actually, Derrida thinks that the very action of giving a gift is impossible, that the conditions of the possibility of gift-giving are the conditions of its impossibility, that the whole idea of giving a real gift is an unreachable ideal. Well. I guess. But it would seem that the it's-time-to-take-your-medicine gift is even shorter of the ideal, impossible gift than most. What makes gifts impossible is the fact of their address necessarily creating the expectation in the recipient of repayment. And nothing suggests automatic repayment (amortization?) than a book proffered for betterment in my opinion: all you have to do to repay the gift (and the gift bears that in itself) is to read the book. It carries the condition of its impossibility right on it.

So much for that. But there is of course the other thing I am attached to doing with my gift-given books: writing in them. I love to write in books, though I can't really figure out my system. This Christmas I put a quote from Sir Thomas Malory in a book about bottled water, and a quote having to do with Mad Men in a book by Sarah Vowell. It took me an hour to find those two quotes and then I sat, looking at the quotes and wondering what kind of sense it makes to write little chunks of some other text-- or even some globs of texts lifted from a television show -- into a book that had nothing to do with them. For a while I felt like it represented a betrayal of whatever book I was gifting, like, "Here, Executive Committee Member Blood, enjoy your book about water but know that what I really feel about you is a different quote about King Arthur". And then it felt like a betrayal of the (of course, impossible alter) people to whom I was gifting these books, as if I had to put everything which I thought about them into a quote that sat in front of their books. It was a long hour, really. But, figure that these are books I am giving people motivated in some way from a take-your-medicine impulse, because it's not like either of these people voiced any particular desire for them. But what I think that prefatory quotes yanked in from other things do is, however much possible, mediate the amortizing built into the take-your-medicine books. It is as if to say: read this book, but here too is a chunk of text that cannot be repaid, that is only here for you. Books can be amortized, repaid, can be a cause for the creation of a new obligation in you, my friends; as can, of course blog posts. But here too are these quotes, unrepayable even in kind, because it is not a move available to any donee to shoot back a piece of text given unto them. All it takes for more ideal gifts is a little inscription, which is actually good medicine for almost anything at all.