A Quote by Mark Leibovich
There's something called the 'Washington Read,' which is the habit of many locals to go into a bookstore, pull a book off the shelf, rifle through the index to see if they're in there.
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Sometimes when I pick up a book off the shelf, when I'm buying a new book to read, I'll look at all of them and they all have the exact same words inside, but I'll think that one is meant to go home with me. I'll never pick the first thing off the shelf, I'll always go one behind.
If you were a medieval scholar reading a book, you knew that there was a reasonable likelihood you'd never see that particular text again, and so a high premium was placed on remembering what you read. You couldn't just pull a book off the shelf to consult it for a quote or an idea.
I picked up 'On Moral Fiction' in the bookstore and looked up myself in the index, but I didn't read it through. I try not to read things that depress me.
If you want to know who the oppressed minorities in America are, simply look at who gets their own shelf in the bookstore. A black shelf, a women's shelf, and a gay shelf.
Corliss wondered what happens to a book that sits unread on a library shelf for thirty years. Can a book rightfully be called a book if it never gets read? If a tree falls in a forest and gets pulped to make paper for a book that never gets read, but there's nobody there to read it, does it make a sound?
I recommend anybody go to a bookstore, go down the self-help or new-age section, and just walk those aisles. See what book jumps out at you; there's a good chance it's a book you need in your life. That's basically how I find the books that I read.
The book of the moment often has immense vogue, while the book of the age, which comes in its company from the press, lies unnoticed; but the great book has its revenge. It lives to see its contemporary pushed up shelf by shelf until it finds its final resting-place in the garret or the auction room.
That's one of the many things about having the bookstore that I adore. I can walk into the store and say to somebody, "I'm glad you're reading this book" or "I'm glad you're getting this book" or "Don't get that book. I read that book and hated that book. Let's get you this book instead."
At that time, I had recently finished a book called Amazing Grace, which many people tell me is a very painful book to read. Well, if it was painful to read, it was also painful to write. I had pains in my chest for two years while I was writing that book.
I read. I order books from the States. I literally go into bookstores, close my eyes, and take things off the shelf. If I don't like the book after a bit, I don't finish it. But I like to be surprised.
I was trying. I was crawling. I was coming into myself. I was trying to in some ways get beyond - what is the word that I'm looking for? - metaphorical language in painting, and to create something that was more indexical. And what I mean by that is that when you go to the library there's an index card that refers to a book that's actual and real in the world. So that index relates to something real.
When I go to places and do book tours, I don't really like doing traditional bookshops. It's nice to walk people through something instead of just standing up in a bookstore.
One day, I found this book at a used bookstore with 'Satanic Bible' written on the cover, and I thought maybe I should read it and see what it is. I thought it was like a religion, but then I read the book, and what was in it was pure life philosophy - and it was a life philosophy that described how I felt at that point.
Because he did not have time to read every new book in his field, the great Polish anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowski used a simple and efficient method of deciding which ones were worth his attention: Upon receiving a new book, he immediately checked the index to see if his name was cited, and how often. The more "Malinowski" the more compelling the book. No "Malinowski", and he doubted the subject of the book was anthropology at all.
When I write and develop things myself, I might work for a while on a script from a book, and then I go back and read the book and go back into it to see if I lost something: is there something there?
All of us can think of a book... that we hope none of our children or any other children have taken off the shelf. But if I have the right to remove that book from the shelf - that work I abhor - then you also have exactly the same right and so does everyone else. And then we have no books left on the shelf for any of us.
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