Closed Book

Closed Book
Ros Thomas
The Weekend West
Published: Saturday September 26, 2015

My teenage son’s dislike of reading is a pall between us. I am alternately saddened and infuriated by his sudden rejection of books. A pile of them sit idly on his bedside table, attracting dust. Their spines are stacked to face his pillow, the titles shouting to his deaf ears.

Every few weeks, I add another book to the pile, hoping it will ignite some glimmer of interest. I encourage, I cajole, I coerce. I paint him word-pictures of his smaller self, bewitched by the favourite stories of his childhood. I remind him how he had always been a rapacious reader; his books as precious as his Lego. I pull the Roald Dahls from his bookcase. We had bedded down with them night after night, the pair of us in raptures. I leave them lying around to serve as small mnemonics of the delights of reading. He is unmoved.

I lose my patience. I rant. I thrust books into his hands. “How can you not want to read?” I demand. “You’re so good at it. You’ve always loved reading. He shrugs: “Not any more.”

Later, to mollify me, he flops on the sofa and makes a pretence of being bookish with Stephen Fry. But I can see his heart’s not in it: he cannot find the stillness required to slip into another’s skin, to listen to another’s voice. Instead, he monitors the clock so he dare not read a minute more than the 30 minutes he’s promised me.

That night, sensing my exasperation has expired, he fronts me in the kitchen. “You’ve gotta let go, Mum,” he says, gently. “Reading’s not my thing, ok?”

I carry his words to my desk and remember the narrow-mindedness of being 15. He must discover for himself what the rest of us already know: that reading will give him a safe place to go. Reading will teach him what it’s like to be someone else. Reading will make him forget himself.

As an only child, I escaped to books early. Aged 12, my library card became a precious ticket for transporting me elsewhere. Our local library had soft carpet and high ceilings and a knack for absorbing my Saturday mornings.

The silence was mesmerising. If I tuned my ear, I could detect the low whispers of conversation at the front desk, the thud of a dropped book or a series of metallic thumps as the librarian stamped a stack of borrowings. The shrill voice of a child would shatter the stillness, followed by an urgent “shh!” from a parent. And then the quietness would envelop me again. Against a warm window overlooking the park, I retreated into my book, only to emerge an hour later, elated but mentally exhausted.

My favourite librarian was a flamboyant gent with a halo of wild silvery hair who’d stop by my desk each Saturday and mime his request to see what I was reading. I’d flip shut my book to show him the cover. He’d nod his approval before sweeping away with his armful of books. In a library, all readers are created equal.

A new book still delivers me its own small thrill. Perhaps it’s the promise of deep reading: slow and immersive. I hanker after that meditative state induced by concentration. With a book, I can sink beneath the everyday. I become oblivious even to the mechanics of reading – the gentle turning of pages -propelling me through a gripping story.

Books have left me euphoric but withered by tiredness; I have fought sleep to stay with their characters long past midnight. I have woken, bleary-eyed after a reading marathon, desperate to begin again.

Is it just me, or is online reading somehow less engaging? Less satisfying? I find myself repeatedly sidetracked by banner ads and neon signage. Click this link? Close that window? Visit that site? My brain splinters. I need the speed limits of ink on paper.

Perhaps my son’s boredom with books is not from lack of reading skills, but his inability to focus his attention. Reading for pleasure takes discipline and practice. It requires a stillness of mind. In his world, no book can compete with the endless frivolity of the internet. I tell him books will be his most constant of friends. He sighs and rolls his eyes.

I am not alone in my disappointment. I hear the despair from other mums whose teenage sons have shunned the pleasures of reading. “Where did I go wrong?” I ask a friend over coffee. She shakes her head: “You didn’t. He did. But it’s your job to fix it before it’s too late.”

“How? I’ve tried everything,” I reply, deflated.

I stop in at the book shop for counselling. “Try these,” says the bright young assistant. “Find the right book and he’ll read again.”

I leave $100 poorer but full of hope. Wish me luck.

Not Yet Booked Out

Not Yet Booked Out
Ros Thomas
The Weekend West
Published: Saturday September 13, 2014

The sight of so many books made my heart skip. Thousands of them sat pressed together on tables, a sea of spines, filling the University of WA’s Winthrop Hall. A smiling fellow with a silvery moustache stood by the door in a black apron. “Half price today,” he said. “We’re open ‘til 9.30 tonight.”

A hushed crowd inched along the tables, heads bowed over the vast array of titles. I could hear the gentle fluttering of pages, the murmurs of quiet conversations, an occasional soft thud as a heavy book was shut. The ceiling fans circled lazily.

I wandered over to a table piled with old tomes. I prised free a mottled-green volume. It was a book of Robert Browning’s poetry, printed in 1908. I ran a finger over the embossed gold lettering and opened the cover, inhaling the musty sweetness of its ageing paper. The flyleaf was inscribed with a beautiful handwritten cursive, all graceful loops and flourishes: ‘Mary – Ad finem fidelis – George’

The kindly doorman in the black apron happened to be standing behind me and craned over my shoulder. ‘Faithful to the end’, he said quietly. I smiled my ignorant thanks and admired George’s penmanship anew.

The pages of Robert Browning’s verse felt thick and coarse. They were handcut, some snipped a centimetre shorter than their neighbours. As I fanned through them, a rose petal slipped from between two pages and fluttered to the floor. Featherlight in my palm, the petal had once been crimson, but was now yellowed with age and puckered from the weight of a hundred pages. It had been pressed against a poem on page 138, ‘The Last Ride Together.’ I was intrigued.

…What if we still ride on, we two

With life for ever old yet new,

Changed not in kind but in degree,

The instant made eternity, — ”

Had the petal been pressed by George or by Mary? Or by some later owner? Did this gift mark the beginning of a love story or a reconciliation? I decided good books don’t give up all their secrets at once, and tucked Browning under my arm to ward off other browsers.

Standing to my left was a matron who’d picked up a scuffed leather-bound book with loose joints and torn hinges. She was elbowing her husband and tittering. Her husband was feigning interest but he himself was absorbed in a book about submarines (fancifully titled Up Periscope).

Tired of trying to hold his attention, she caught mine instead and proffered the ragged book. “Have a look at this!” she said. “It’s priceless!” I read the cover: The Witches Broomstick Manual. On the frontispiece, the illustrator had attempted a flattering portrait of a hag astride her broomstick, silhouetted against a full moon. The subtitle read: The Construction, Care and Use of the Witches’ Broom; Complete with a Course of Flight Instruction.

“Just what I need!” I replied. “The broom I’ve got at home is useless!”

I flicked through the soiled and spotted pages, stopping at a chapter on “Air Safety.” I read aloud to her: “Only fly at night. Avoid areas of military or political sensitivity. Study the stars and learn to guide by them. A small flashlight will be of immense value aloft. Your speed and height are limited only by atmospheric pressure and the prevailing weather. Be warned: daytime flying will cause trouble.”

“No kidding,” she said and we both giggled. The next paragraph concerned seatbelts: “A strong belt or rope tied around your waist should be fastened to the Besom (broom), so that you may be rescued after a possible separation. It may seem undignified to come in for a landing dangling at the end of a rope, but pride is no substitute for safety.”

“Marvellous!” she said. Her husband turned to me and sighed: “Please don’t let that book come home with us!”

I wedged it carefully back into the pile and the couple drifted to another table. All around the hall, people were moving in slow rotations, engrossed in the quiet pleasure of book inspections. Most had a selection concertinaed along one arm. Those with too many to carry were offloading books into boxes, stacked in clumsy pagodas against the wall.

Perhaps, despite our gadgetry, we will always turn to books for comfort? For consolation, or stimulation or escape. Maybe books are the only true magic? I headed for the exit and handed over the book of poetry wedged in my armpit.

“Aah Robert Browning!” said the woman at the counter. She admired the cover, then gently opened it to find the price. The book fell open at George’s Latin inscription to Mary and she looked at me quizzically. “Faithful to the end,” I said. “How lovely,” she said. “That’ll be $6 please.”

Under the Covers

Under the Covers
Ros Thomas
The West Weekend Magazine
Published January 26, 2013
Section: Opinion

I learnt more about men and sex in 1985 than I should have, thanks to a book called The Hite Report. It was a fat well-thumbed paperback, containing interviews with hundreds of blokes on everything from ‘What Men like Women to Wear’ to ‘How A Man Likes to be Seduced.’ Its pages were coffee stained at juicy junctions, underlined and exclamation marked, and I discovered a silverfish entombed near the spine in a chapter devoted to Men’s Fantasies. (‘Stop talking’ featured heavily in the advice to women.)

I used to hide out with a girlfriend in a deserted corner of the University library, sitting on the floor between the compactors. There we would pore over the book we re-named ‘the boy bible’ absorbing every carnal secret: “Surely they can’t want us to do that?” If we were startled by approaching footsteps, we would slam our bible shut and in fits of giggles, jam it back into the shelf. That book sustained us through an entire semester of Psychology 100. I can still faintly remember the sweet woody scent of its yellowing pages.

Twenty years later, with the mysteries of marital relations (mostly) solved, I’ve made several attempts to rediscover a copy of The Hite Report on the internet or in second hand bookshops, but it’s out of print. Part of me desperately wants to be shocked anew, feel the weight of a thousand men’s desires in my hands. Like all books, that one transcends time: it is the only graspable remnant of my 17-year-old self, hungry to learn the ways of the world.

Such is the power of the book: the cleverness of minds printed onto leaves of pulped wood and sewn to leather bindings. Or bound and glued to a paperback spine. If asked to name what things I would be most devastated to lose, my book collection would top the list.

My life is bookended by the assorted volumes of other people’s imaginations in print. It began with the Golden Books read to me as a toddler in the 1970’s, every one of them saved by Mum in her longings for grandchildren. My small daughter and I now read those slim little board-books with the same wonder. For me, the illustrations are instantly recognisable even after forty years of living have got in the way.

Enid Blyton, the Famous Five and the fantasy worlds of C.S. Lewis soon followed. As a teenager, I discovered the great novels, and was carried away into the villages and slums of Thomas Hardy and Dickens, curled up in my single bed at home. At 35, newly divorced, I was overwhelmed reading Yann Martel’s Life of Pi, because I too felt alone and adrift, like the boy on the boat with the tiger. Books can exalt time and place, remind you where you were in life the week you read them.  Just last month, I couldn’t wait to climb into bed with the new Nigella cookbook and fantasise about the gluttonous pleasures of chestnut icecream, at the expense of the husband who gave her to me.

Stories of the death of the book are everywhere . But not once had I heard an argument that captures what it is about books I love most, until an elderly American author called Philip Zimbardo said simply: ‘It is something you hold, near to your heart.” Yes! My books too, are pressed into me.

I am drawn to bookshops – there is something soothing about browsing amongst the shelves, thumbing new books, fingering embossed covers and sharp cut edges. It’s the promise of quiet escape.

Try getting sensuous with a Kindle, or an iPad – please tell me it’s not the same? Friends, avid readers also, have emptied their houses of books, fed up with the clutter and dust. They tell me I won’t miss the clumsy mass of my books, that electronic readers are brilliant by design and just as satisfying. I don’t believe them.

Do I fear the extinction of the book? Not yet. But I fear for bookshops. I take heart knowing the internet hasn’t killed off television, that television didn’t wipe out radio, radio didn’t hurt newspapers.  Technology is changing how we read, how we buy books and store them, but I will never part with my leafy treasures.

I will, however, buy hard-to-find books on the internet, and order others on-line when they’re half the price. But some books need to be fancied and flirted with in person. A cook book, in particular, must be felt, studied, assessed for compatibility with the cook. If it still inspires after that first meeting in the shop, it can be bought and taken home in a stiff paper bag to be consumed with the same greedy thrill as a new lover.

I cannot imagine the day when I do not look upon a much desired book and want to hold it as a rare and marvellous thing. I will then carry it gently to the bath, where no Kindle dares to follow.