I mentioned in my reading review for The Shell Game that I initially came across this book due to my interest in reading ‘The Body’, a specific essay that was excerpted in the collection. I thought today I would expand on this example because the step of going from ‘The Body’ to The Shell Game – and beyond – demonstrates how I allow one thing to lead to another when it comes to finding my next book.
The prologue to this story starts with the podcast Book Fight!, a show where each week writers Mike Ingram and Tom McCallister discuss and analyze various works of literature. Their discussion of ‘The Body’ on this episode prompted me to search for a copy of the essay on the usually reliable Information Superhighway. Unfortunately, in this case I found myself unable to obtain a full copy of the essay. A series of additional searches led me to The Shell Game, the collection that explored various innovative forms and structures with work that would otherwise be presented in a standard essay format.
As noted previously, ‘The Body’ was not among my favorite pieces in The Shell Game. However, I enjoyed a number of its ‘essays’ and found myself taking down quite a few notes on the various topics these authors explored. One note caught my eye while I was preparing the initial reading review – a written warning has no value where people don’t read. This prompted me to think about a moving chapter from a book I read earlier this year. As I recalled, it described the immense regret of a dying wanderer as he lay in the shade of a tree. Among his final recollections was a lament that although he never learned to read, he was still forced to obey the command of written law.
I was certain that this came from The Prophet, Khalil Gibran’s 1923 masterpiece. Given that I was writing about The Prophet for my TOA Book Award at that time, I decided to make sure I included a reference to this section in my post. This plan hit a snag when I reviewed my notes and saw no mention of this excerpt. I thought it was odd but plowed ahead anyway and finished my post.
A few days later, I decided that I should check again just to ensure I wasn’t falsely attributing something to The Prophet. One advantage of an old classic is that (unlike certain NEW books) there is a high likelihood of it being online. I pulled open a digital copy of The Prophet and did some basic searches. I found nothing. My quick glances through the PDF convinced me that I should probably reread it again – the only question was whether to do so right away or wait for my traditional December rereading month. I decided to review my reading list first just in case something else seemed like a possibility.
The only other book that I remembered having any writing similar to The Prophet was Isabella Eberhardt’s Oblivion Seekers. I pulled open my notes and found the reference right away. Since the book obviously had stuck in my mind, I also added The Oblivion Seekers to my rereading list for December.
The question about my original note being settled (‘a written warning has no value where people don’t read’) I returned to the task of completing the reading review. As I thought deeply about the ‘essays’ that I liked most, I decided it would be a decent idea to check for other work from the authors. The essay I liked most, ‘We Regret…’ was written by Brenda Miller. A little additional investigation into her writing brought me around on two books I thought would be interesting, Season of the Body and Tell It Slant. I’m about halfway through the former and my initial reaction is that I should forget about two books, I should just go ahead and read all of her work.
This is a good place to stop and come up with the official tally of how much future reading I can attribute to that initial Book Fight! episode:
The Shell Game
The Prophet
The Oblivion Seekers
Season of the Body
Tell It Slant
I’ve never reviewing my process in this detail before but I suspect there are quite a few such groups of four and five littered throughout my reading list. In a world where I allow one thing to lead so easily to another, I wonder which book I can credit for leading me to the most total books. This not a project I intend to take on, rest assured, but from time to time I might come back and detail a ‘reading tree’, particularly if I think one incident can be credited with an unusually high number of subsequent books.
