From Used Bookstores to Prairie Dog Towns

Recently when talking to a friend about some of my latest reading interests, I expressed frustration with the recommendation pages of some websites, like my local library, Amazon, and Goodreads. I stated, “I love reading, but I find the hunt for stuff to read tedious.” And then an odd feeling took hold.

Throughout much of the rest of that day I felt a sense of unease with myself, like a mild dose of shame. I wished I hadn’t said I find the hunt for reading material “tedious,” and I wasn’t sure exactly why, but I increasingly felt guilty of ingratitude, like the guy who starts poor, makes it big, and then loses sensitivity to those in his former plight. Thinking back on past book acquisition methods, I went way back. First, of course, came school libraries and then public libraries. I suppose bookstores existed in abundance back the 1970s and early 1980s, but I didn’t have money in abundance, and when in momentary possession of funds, they never lasted beyond a visit to the record store.

It wasn’t until the mid-1980s and the acquisition of after-school jobs and an automobile that the added freedom led me to what would become an integral part of my life for the next couple of decades: the used bookstore. First, during that youthful time of few preferences and even fewer prejudices that come as a result of a college education, there was the joy at being able to buy more paperbacks than I could carry out of the store. Later, with the adoption of some puffed-up pomposity, I could assign rank to used bookstores. Some were better for the pulp of the masses, while others were better suited to my haughty refined tastes. I can remember a lot about used bookstores, and all of it makes me smile. One thing I don’t remember was a sense of tedium.

Back then, a used bookstore required an in-person visit. I used to have to physically hunt through used book stores. Was that process tedious? Certainly not in memory, but then nostalgia can be a tricky, deceptive thing. But according to memory, the process was neither frustrating nor laborious. It was something I looked forward to, a form of recreation where I would find treasures for if not actual pennies then at least at a ratio of pennies on the dollar.

What if back then I had known that one day I could look on a computer screen that to my comprehension at the time would have looked more like television than the monochrome text I associated with computers, and what if I had known that with the mere click of a button the text of a book would be sent to a variety of devices in my possession, including a rectangular thing we call "phone" that is about double the size and infinitely more versatile than the communicators featured on the television show Star Trek? And what if I would have known that even in such a future of effortless acquisition of reading material that I would still find things to complain about?

But, of course, history doesn’t unfold that way, and none of us are actually Rip Van Winkle, no matter how seemingly sudden the changes. I’m not sure when the used bookstores went away. For a while, I became wholly focused on the required reading for school, and there wasn’t time for recreational reading and thus no reason to peruse used bookstores. And eventually all of that reading for classes led to reading (and writing) for employment, and in the meantime the internet had evolved into my default source for all reading material, both reference and recreational. And then one day when making an unappreciative observation about acquiring reading material, I stopped, thought about what I had just said, and noticed that all the used bookstores had vanished.

Maybe they’re being kept somewhere with all the payphones.

Awash in my own absurdity, I had to wonder if book procurement was really the chief complaint about reading in the digital age. Perhaps a more serious grievance could be directed at a much more time-consuming predicament, one that seemed to emerge only with the incredible ease that one-click shopping offers: the rabbit hole. In fact, this pitfall, this hazard to the linear course of reading has become so severe as to warrant a different name. Maybe it’s not so much a rabbit hole as a prairie dog town so full of holes that when you emerge from one you’re sure to fall into another after only a single step.

The only reason I didn’t fall into a rabbit hole with my first e-book was because I had already read all other books by that author, and that process could not be considered a fall into a rabbit hole because it took years. By contrast, once I started regularly downloading e-books and spending time on sites like Goodreads, there was always the recommendation for further reading, and with one-click I could be immediately reading another book by the author of the one just finished. One of the first examples I recall started with a writer called Timothy Egan. I read The Worst Hard Time: The Untold Story of Those Who Survived the Great American Dust Bowl, followed immediately by A Fever in the Heartland, The Immortal Irishman, and Breaking Blue. Shortly thereafter I encountered an adventure tale called The Lost City of Z: A Tale of Deadly Obsession in the Amazon by a guy called David Grann, so of course I had to immediately read Killers of the Flower Moon, The Wager, The Devil & Sherlock Holmes, The White Darkness, and The Old Man and the Gun. No sooner had I emerged from that prairie dog tunnel than I ran across a book on local history by a local journalist, and Jeff Guinn’s Go Down Together: The True, Untold Story of Bonnie and Clyde straightaway led to Waco: David Koresh, the Branch Davidians, War on the Border, and Our Land Before We Die. I would have thought I would have been safe from yet another rodent shaft in the work of a writer who for years wrote obituaries, but then I encountered Margalit Fox’s The Confidence Men: How Two Prisoners of War Engineered the Most Remarkable Escape in History, which compelled me to devour The Riddle of the Labyrinth, The Talented Mrs. Mandelbaum, and Conan Doyle for the Defense.

No longer was I able to follow interests by topic. Instead, I had become trapped, enchanted by particular writers, and if asked while in any one of these rabbit holes I would have stated emphatically that any one of these writers were perhaps one of the greatest writers of all time, certainly of our time. This phenomenon didn’t happen with such intensity during the used bookstore days. But is it really something to complain about? Is it perhaps just as silly as describing the time it takes to think about my next one-click book acquisition as tedious?

Maybe I should go find a pay phone to call someone who cares.