Since my last post in 2021, I’ve started and never finished 25 different newsletters that are sitting in my “drafts” folder, all of which I will probably delete once I finish this post. I am determined to finish it. Since I wrote my second (and last) letter to Al, I’ve started and stopped four book projects — I will probably pulp those, too. Since I wrote about On Immunity, I’ve read maybe 100 books, which, over the course of two years, is hardly anything. Since I last wrote to you, I’ve obtained five semi-debilitating injuries, gotten my heart stomped on, acquired two (2) cats, moved twice, bought a sofa, made my own schmaltz, criss-crossed the length and breadth of the world, and maintained eight (8) browser windows filled with tabs upon tabs upon tabs.1
This morning I deactivated most of my social channels, deciding that this newsletter will probably be the only place I’ll hang out for a while. There is a kind insulation to the mono-directional channel, a sort of veil of protection that I’m fading behind right now. I’ve been thinking about ghosts, recently, and a phantom has come rattling the gates of my home. Someone gifted me a bag of salt for Christmas, so I’ll be lining the lintels and thresholds, and hanging these slivers of glittering metal to ward away the pigeons that keep shitting on my balcony.
but please know that I am okay.
I.
For a little while I was a school librarian, and then I left when that work burned me out (tiny kids are really fun but massive energy vampires). Teachers will tell you that no two days are the same in a school, but it’s different in a library — the kids come at regular intervals, and yeah the books we read or the papers that we colour or the weird games of hide-and-seek between the stacks — those are all different, but there is a nice cycle to library life. If we’re being brutally honest, I was a glorified babysitter, especially for younger kids (5 to 8 years) with older siblings or busy parents/caregivers, but I didn’t mind it so much. I used to say I was “hanging out” with my tiny friends.
It’s a truly bizarre experience listening to little kid logic, and it was exhausting to be there from 8am to 4.30pm because you’re worried the kids won’t have somewhere safe to be while they wait for their cars to turn up — but it was something I loved a lot for a while, and miss on occasion.
The other part of my job — the part I absolutely hated — was managing the truly staggering number of books in the library. These ranged from genuinely cool books to dusty, old coffee table books that seemed to multiply like rabbits in some dark corners of the school’s weird architecture. There were copies of a memoir written by the founder’s late father, a policeman in the 70s, with covers gone sticky from the heat, and expensive IB and GCSE textbooks, just one quarter out of date so they had to be put to pasture. In other corners, there were boxes of “donated books”, with a sparse handful of gems and (mostly) crap: romance novels with (inappropriate) clinch covers, outdated encyclopaedias, books on how to have babies and run businesses, and (most bafflingly) a series of Russian folk stories…in Russian.
The library was a mess when I inherited it, grinding along with a clunky, two-bit software that only lived on one computer that was wholly incompatible with any modern attempt to extract it off the CPU. That computer gave up the ghost six months into my tenure, and the IT department said it wasn’t worth fixing because, truthfully, no software existed that could have penetrated the mainframe’s total obsolescence.
The physical labour of managing the library fucked up my body — carrying books up and down stairs, fighting a constant battle against the internal chaos of school children, and managing piles of textbooks, each weighing 1/4th of my total mass. At some point, maybe a year after schools reopened after the MCOs eased, they moved me from my already-cramped library space into an even smaller room where the ceilings and windows leaked, dust gathered in every corner, and the sounds of the kindergarten cafeteria below wafted up at 2-hour intervals.
In short, it was hellish and I regret complaining about the previous space.
The reason I bring up these memories of that time of my life is that a friend was updating me about the librarian who took over when I left that job. Like me, she is also constantly battling the never-ending tide of coffee table tomes and abandoned books, and like me, she’s constantly being harangued to find homes for them, in the library or the care of others. In the inciting incident, a kerfuffle had ensued, and the books scattered to the winds, only for panic to set in when someone pointed out that those books needed to be logged so they could be recollected at some, undetermined point in time by some undetermined person.
My friend looked at me as she concluded her story, and was like, “You know, I keep coming back to what you said before about pulping books.”
“I’m always right,” I offered in return.
I think very often there is this perception that to love books is to treat them like treasured objects — like relics — but in many ways, that elides the actual value of a book: its ideas, the labour in its creation, and the connections that they bring into our lives. These are the qualities of books that should be preserved, and, in my experience, the people who very loudly claim to love books are very often the same ones who a) don’t read broadly or that much, and b) will deny others access to certain types of books, and who are quick to moralise about the “right” kind of book. Usually these types come with all sorts of exhortations to “get kids to read the classics!” as if these somehow have some intrinsic value that comic books necessarily lack (spoiler: that’s bullshit). I always wonder if the care with which people treat their books — don’t break the spine, don’t dog ear the pages, wrap them in plastic — is paired with an equal care for the ideas within the pages.
I’ve also been guilty of fetishising books — don’t ever touch my 17th century copy of Ben Jonson’s Timber, or my 18th century Shakespeare and Faerie Queene — but the books I loved the most — the ones I read over, and over, and over again, which installed my primordial buttons — are wrecked as hell. The copy of Ella Enchanted that I read like 50 times was falling apart before I decided I needed to just buy a new copy. It took me a 15 years to actually throw out the first copy I had, even though dog earing its pages snapped the paper clean off — but even in my fresh edition, the story still shone.
In the context of the library, its caretakers are constantly being asked to keep the books, to fix them and make sure they can be used over and over again. I’m thinking about the well-loved copy of The Very Hungry Caterpillar had been taped together so many times that one side bulged with layers of plastic and paper. Old Peter and Jane books, with their 1980s patois and kitchen-entrapped mothers, were foisted on kids as a gold standard of children’s literature. Students would regularly come up to me with a copy of an atlas from the 1970s, asking why Malaysia wasn’t on the map and why there were three 2-page spreads dedicated to the UK. You get where I’m going.
I hope that, like me, the bureaucratic expediency of keeping these old books is not lost on you. In my time — and now, still, I bet — management repeatedly insisted that there was something here to save, and of course it was nice that maintaining these old books meant that they shouldn’t have to splash out so much on a budget for new books. Surely someone can use it? Surely it’s still valuable? Surely the kids will go along with it?
II.
It’s like clockwork: the new year or year-end rolls around and so do the boxes of books. Parents speak to their kids’ classroom teachers who are then saddled with packs of storybooks and collections their children have outgrown. The principals — eager to maintain rosy relations with donors or VIPs or opinionated parents — declare the immense fortune the school has received: a box of books in still-good condition.
And the librarian has to say yes because, well, what’s the alternative? No? (No.) Reject an act of charity?
So you say yes to the donation, and you spend an afternoon rifling through the box, and usually there are a few gems, but there are also half-finished colouring or activity books, some old magazines, the odd accounting textbook from the 80s, and so on. And you now add to your growing pile of rejects, items considered “too precious” for their original owners to consign to the rubbish bin, but the sheen of donation eases the soul. It’s not so bad right? I tried my best to find a new home for the books, and what does it matter if it’s the librarian doing the throwing? At least it’s not me.
I attended a UN-sponsored workshop once for refugee teachers who were trying to start their own small community schools; it was run by a truly amazing librarian who started her presentation with a mantra she insisted we all embed at the centre of our work: libraries are not dumping grounds.
In Malaysia, there are not many libraries, but elsewhere in the world, there is a tendency to think of these “third spaces” as essential nodes in a community. In the Global North, they’re places where older and poor people can access the internet, legal and tech advice, where kids can listen to story time, and students can nap or study in peace — all for free. In some rare cases, you can even rent things from the library, like carpet cleaners or kitchen appliances, so you don’t have to buy them. In Auckland late last year, my older sister and I wept at how beautiful the city library was, and how we could have napped there instead of the get-on-get-off bus while we waited for our hostel to let us in.
This might sound utopian, but consider for a moment what that means for the scope of a librarian’s work. Not only are we caregivers for the books, we’re also actual caregivers (story time isn’t relaxing for the storyteller!) and legal advisors and tech troubleshooters and janitors and curators and and and and — add to that the responsibility of fixing up old books and adopting unwanted ones? Pass.
III.
People get really precious about being “book people” — and I say this as a book person! — about loving books, and having books, and displaying books. There is a collector’s impulse here, but also a consumer’s. Before I left, Facebook had begun serving me posts for a page that collated images people were sharing of their personal libraries. Wall-to-wall custom shelves stacked with colourful spines, floating piles of Stephen King novels, squashy armchairs and fairy lights strung up from every corner. It’s all very cozy and lovely, and I lusted after those spaces even as I knew my favourite reading position is (and will remain) lying in my bed in the dark, reading by the dim light of my Kindle.
In Elizabeth Currid-Halkett’s The Sum of Small Things, she observes that the conspicuous consumption that Thorstein Veblen wrote about the 19th century had shifted from a simple marker of individual identity/social status into a kind of anxious, simulation for what she calls “the aspirational class.” People acquire objects, eat certain types of foods, wear a specific fashions that convey their specific values and class. I’m guilty of it, and I suspect many of my peers are too.
The photos of those home libraries are a master text of this kind of conspicuous consumption. Inasmuch as I love a good book, book buying is consumption.
As I planned my move, I was thinking about what would be the best way to store my books so they weren’t just stuff but also decoration, all aimed at demonstrating my personality as a book person. I used to write book reviews and interview writers; I intermittently log into Instagram only so I can message my favourite bookshop about new titles I want to acquire.
But here is my confession: how many of those physical books have I read in the last year? I spend infinitely more time on my Kindle, and increasingly rely on audiobooks. I set new rules for myself — only paperbacks, only titles I know I’ll love, only literary fiction, mostly non-fiction — but I still can’t quite quit the feeling of going into a bookshop, the freedom of an aimless but informed browse, and the dread/joy of knowing I’ll walk out with at least three books. Then I go home, and I look at my shrinking shelf space, and ask myself if I should have just gotten the ebook version.
SIDE NOTE: Recent studies have shown that reading on paper does have additional benefits — tactility, intensity of focus, information retention — compared to ebooks. That said, I’m big on ebooks for a number of reasons: they’re hardier than physical ones, and have a smaller environmental impact. Ebooks are better for those with dyslexia. E-readers represent a high upfront cost, but they can be mitigated and, in the long term, save money.
Often I’ll get the “what about the children?!” question, but in my experience, kids don’t really care about the difference between the mediums, they gain enjoyment from the social experience of storytelling and reading — engaging with friends, parents, and educators about the content. To me, proclamations that “I just read better with a paper book” is just another form of book fetishisation, and often kids will parrot this because they’ve heard their parents say this. I could get petty and go down the rabbit hole of “how many of those parents are real readers” which I’ve done before, but that’s another newsletter.
Many serious readers I know only buy on ebook now. There is research pointing to ebooks being effective in partnership with paper formats, better for access, note-taking and mixed-media studies. As always, the answer is “moderation.”
Finally, the “better” you are noticing with physical books is a matter of attention, not format. Physical books make it easier for you to focus attention; but if you’ve already eroded that muscle, it doesn’t matter what the format is, you’ll struggle to finish anything.
The thought isn’t yet fully-formed, but I do wonder how much of the personal library impulse I’ve observed in middle-class Malaysian households is also partly built on an anxiety about our lack of public knowledge centres here. People will point to the mediocre KL Public Library and (truly great) Selangor public library systems as examples of what we have, but that’s like propping up a society-wide need for books with q-tips. One lady on Facebook talked about how she had transformed a corner of her Sepang bungalow into a personal/public library, where members of her community were welcome to borrow books and sit/study on the weekends. I’ve personally been thinking about whether my own substantial collection would be of interest to anyone.
When the public sphere fails to resource the people in its body, the market will provide. Consumption, they’ll tell you, is the solution.
Then you — the consumer — end up with a home filled up with more stuff, and because you can never read all the books in the world, and the market is good at selling you stuff, you keep a running list of all the other books you want, all the reading you could do, and your shelves overflow so even IKEA wins because how else will you store all these books?
I’m aware that my favourite bookstore is also dependent on these market solutions to survive, but I think that that is also a failure of public policy. I devote a significant budget to buying from them partly because there is nowhere else to purchase from (Kinokuniya is very far away!). Back in 2012, I jumped through hoops to open an American Amazon account so I could access location-locked titles, and taught myself how to efficiently pirate books, whispering apologies to the authors in the West who are also being paid a pittance. Parents at my school stocked the houses with books bought from overseas — begged and borrowed from friends abroad, paying exorbitant shipping fees — and many came to donate these books with demands that they be treated well.
So I take the books, and catalogue them, and I keep buying books, and I listen with envy as my sister in Canada tells me about the novels she’s just gotten from the free, nearby public library.
IV.
Okay, but more to the point, what do you do with all the books you have in your house? Do you donate them to your nearest mall public library, a “initiative” by property developers designed to launder their offerings of land and space to the gods of consumption/capitalism? Which will inevitably be filled with more crap and trash from people who have stocked up on shit during the last Big Bad Wolf sale? Do you take them to that cafe you noticed had a “trade-in” community bookshelf, which has ended up housing stacks and stacks and stacks of Hansards and legal textbooks? Do you foist them on refugee schools who asked for textbooks but got “Yoga for Dummies” instead?
If you can, pulp your books.
Find a paper recycler, a mill, a trash compactor — just get rid of them. They’re paper, they will decompose. Stop treating libraries like dumpsters, and stop thinking that buying that book you may/may not ever read will fix the anxieties that you have about your self, your kids, your job, your relationships. In fact, stop thinking that buying more of anything will fill that void.
If you don’t want a book anymore — and if no one wishes to take it from you, for money or nothing — then just honestly get rid of it. Kiss it goodbye, say a little prayer, thank it for its service, and just put it in the trash. There are no book gods to smite you. The pages won’t come back to haunt you at night.
And maybe — just maybe — get the ebook version instead.
Much love, from the void,
Sam.
While I am determined to finish this newsletter, I’m not sure when I’ll send it, so just assume all these things have already happened at some point in the swirl of time.