On Books (Finished and Unfinished)

I know very little about the invention of the printing press or how it works, but that won’t stop from extolling it as one of the greatest machines ever created. The power to mass produce the printed word has been a never-ending gift to human kind.

I love books. I love their timelessness. Books persist as a medium of communication in the face of perpetually rapid technological achievement. Last month, Steve Jobs pronounced the death of reading. I’m a big fan of Apple. I use my MacBook a lot and love my new iPod, but Jobs couldn’t be more wrong about reading. Here’s a survey stating that 27% of Americans read more than 15 books a year. With the U.S. population over 300 million that number means that at least 1.2 billion books are read by a quarter of the world’s biggest consumer market. If the rest of nation reads an average of one book a year that ups the number of books read in American in a single year to 1.5 billion. That number dwarves the 3.7 million iPhones sold in 2007. Long story short, the publishing industry has nothing to worry about.

I love the physicality of books. I love the way the paper feels in my hands. I love the smell of the ink. I love the way books look on my shelves. The closest one can measure a person by possessions is by browsing his or her home library.

As someone who has professed a love of movies over all things, rare is it that I find a movie adaptation better than its source. I was so floored by Cormac McCarthy’s No Country for Old Men that I felt underwhelmed after seeing the movie adaptation made by two of my favorite filmmakers. The pictures in my own head born out of great writing feel more vivid than anything on a screen. What a great feeling is to be so enrapt with a book that you can’t physically let go.

Beloved books feel like home. White Noise, The End of the Affair, Mother Night, A Scanner Darkly, Survivor, The Left Hand of Darkness, Tumble Home. I can live in these books.

I write about books because I’m currently experiencing a new phenomenon with a great book. That book is The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle by Haruki Murakami. I started reading the book two years ago and I have yet to finish it. Usually when I take forever to read a single book it’s because I generally dislike it. I read Moby Dick over the course of a year and hated every page of it. However, I love The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle. It might be one of the best books I’ve ever read. I’ll pick it up, get engrossed in it and then put it down for months. I’ll pick it up again later and repeat the cycle, not missing a beat. The book is long compared to most modern novels, but not excessively so. It’s a breeze to read, fascinating and an endlessly beautiful work of art. I’m just taking forever to finish it. I’m almost done. It will be a bittersweet finish. I’ll feel glad to finally have finished it, but I’ll miss living inside the book.

Has this ever happened to anybody? Has anybody else out there had problems finishing a book they loved? How did your story end?