On the pleasures of stumbling upon books in the wrong places | Hacker News Reader

On the pleasures of stumbling upon books in the wrong places

theparisreview.org

123 pointsdiodorus39 comments

There's a street in Bangalore where people sell old books by weight[1]. Usually, it's full of old cheap textbooks sold off by students, outdated magazines (like Readers Digest) and such. I spent a cool day walking through, random sampling the piles of books and found a copy of PG's On Lisp in mint condition.

[1] https://www.google.co.in/search?tbm=isch&q=avenue+road+Banga...

I found a battered copy of 1984 in a school hallway once. At the time I hate books because I mostly read the ones we were taught in English class, which were mostly Hardy Boy-esque type books so I all books were like that. After reading 1984 I realized what books actually were and I've been an avid reader since then. I have a bookshelf filled with books, and then when I run out of space I'm filling up the floor around it with books. And I still have that worn copy of 1984.

On one of my trips, I bought a number of copies of a few books and left them in random places as I drove, more or less randomly, around the country.

I put an email address in each one, along with a quick note. I got exactly one response.

I left copies of:

Ishmael; Another Roadside Attraction; Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintanence; Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy; Battle Cry

(the formatting kinda sucks)

A dozen copies of each, except Ishmael which I bought the half dozen I found at a bookstore along the way and added those to my random seeding of books.

I hope they were placed in the right places and at the right times, but I only got one reply so maybe not.

Which one got a reply?

Ishmael. The reply was more about the note that I'd left than the book itself. Though, they thanked me for the book and felt that it'd be something they might appreciate later in life. They said that it was too deep for them and they weren't able to understand it all. I replied and told them that I'd read it multiple times, at different stages in life, and that I'd not fully understood it either - that I took something new away with each reading.

Well, I looked up some reviews on Ishmael because of this discussion, and it doesn't seem quite like what I'm looking for at the moment, but it did cause me to stumble onto "The Hero with a Thousand Faces" which I'm now thinking of picking up. I wonder if anyone here has opinions on it...

I'll say that Ishmael is something that is a bit different every time I read it. No, obviously the words are the same every time. But, each time, I take something different away.

I think that only the first time did I take away what the author intended. It's not the book that is what I always take away, but what I think about while reading the book. It's not just what it says, but what it doesn't say.

I don't even totally agree with the various conclusions and note some logical flaws. But, it inspires me to think, to be introspective, and to look at things a little differently than I had before.

I can't really review the book anymore. I probably could have reviewed it when I first read it. I might have been able to review it after each reading, but they'd have been different reviews every time.

Then again, I suppose this is a bit of a review...

I've been reading "The Hero with a Thousand Faces" recently; it's very good, especially if you enjoy mythology or heroic fiction in general. Not sure I agree with the psychoanalytic stuff in it, though.

Ishmael is well worth reading even if you aren't persuaded by it

I greatly enjoyed The Hero with a Thousand Faces. Reading it caused me to buy collections of folk tales from several different cultures.

This is an interesting idea. I came across a copy of "When Harlie was One" in a geocache while backpacking once. I would have loved to contact the person who put it there to ask them what they were thinking :-)

Yeah, I tend to just get up and go on long journeys. I try to make them mean something more than just engaging in wanderlust. It has given me the chance to see the world and meet many, many people.

I wish I'd more replies from my book seeding but it serves to demonstrate that what I thought was sheer brilliance really wasn't seen as such by others. It's humbling but not without reward in and of itself.

Those were all books that had impacted me in some way. I left personalized notes in each one, as well as the email address. So, to answer what I was thinking, I was thinking that I'd share something that had been meaningful to me, in some vain hope of similitude. I guess it was more about the hope of a shared experience, even if remote and unknown.

Perhaps they just finished the book and didn't want to carry it about any more?

Not that I would ever do anything like that you understand...

That's become a worldwide movement: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BookCrossing

Yeah, I read about that later. I was actually later than that site but didn't know about a movement or anything.

I got the idea from having found a book in my youth. I wasn't sure if the book had been left or lost, but it was a good book and the finding of the book led me to enjoying science fiction.

I figured I'd try to make it more meaningful than that and left books that had influenced me. However, I got only one reply. I should do it again but make them gift certificates for the local bookstore. Then they can read what they want.

I travel light and love to read so I drop books off in public places naturally, had no idea it was a thing. Thanks!

JJ Abrams supposedly got inspired after finding a book that was left purposefully for someone else to find. He channeled that inspiration into a book titled "S." by Doug Dorst. I'm not a huge fiction reader but I have found the book really fascinating. It's presented as a fictional book called The Ship Of Thesus with notes in the margins from two people as they read it and passed it back and forth.

Toby Litt wrote a novel called Finding Myself where the book is presented as a diary account of a holiday with some friends of the fictional protagonist, but it includes notes from the editor of the character who has written the diary.

Been thinking of dropping off books to the local "neighborhood library" (one of those small unmanned stalls) but I'd been delinquent. You've given me the motivation to get around to it tomorrow; thx.

When I do that, I try to do the opposite of what it seems everyone else does. Namely, I try to give away the good books. It seems most want to keep the good books and give away the not so good books. I try to give away books that I'd want to read.

Yes this occurred to me as well. Luckily I have a few old beat up copies of good books like Catch22.

Reminds me of http://bookcrossing.com which has been around for a while, lets you put an ID number in each book and then you can track it as others find it. I released a handful of books in NZ and London about 10 years ago via bookcrossing

I found an old SciFi anthology book as an early teen, I think in a bargain bucket at a Woolworths, called "Adventures in Tomorrow" it contained various short stories set at varying eras in the future, many by authors who went on to be quite famous... I mentioned this to my wife when I was 50 and she found an original hardback for pennies on Amazon Marketplace and it has re-kindled an enjoyment of fantasy writing that I had all but forgotten due to my incessant reading of manuals and factual texts... I must put aside more time for reading purely for enjoyment!

I once found Hannah Arendt's "Ursprünge und Elemente totalitärer Herrschaft" in the street (in a small box with books). With newspaper clippings about her between the back pages... a book I had been meaning and then forgetting to read for 1-2 years before that. I still don't know whether I am more shocked that I found it or that someone put it in the street like that. But since then I always examine such boxes of books, and I'm finding more books I find interesting than I have time to read. I just love the randomness of it.

This just happened to me yesterday, at the library. I was walking around, not looking for anything in particular. I found the most amazing book and read through almost half of it before I ordered it on amazon and a few others by the same author. I also vowed to donate money to the library when I'm rich.

What was the book?

Why not just borrow the library book and donate the money you would have used on the amazon books to the library instead, or donate the amazon books to the library? Maybe next time at least :)

I'm a book-lover and have a wall full of books i've collected over 25+yrs. Yet all I could think of reading this -- Breaking Bad.

A diary entry published in the Paris Review. There's not much about books there, but there is a whole lot of I.

It's a blog post

It's the story of one person who found one book, which is very different and much less interesting than the title suggests.

Librarian here. There is no pleasure of stumbling upon a book in the wrong place.

As a library user it's a pet peeve of mine. If I ever see a book in wrong place, I just put it back where it belongs. There's noting more infuriating than not finding a book and knowing it's somewhere in there.

> As a library user it's a pet peeve of mine.

As a book user I really hate this misuse of syntax. This pet peeve of yours is not a library user.

> If I ever see a book in wrong place, I just put it back where it belongs.

A lot of university libraries clearly instruct users not to put books back after taking them off the shelf, because in putting it back "in the right place", they often get it wrong. Instead, one should put it in a designated place for the library staff to shelve it instead.

Maybe that's why they used to chain books to the shelves / reading stands? (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chained_library)

That's actually good advice. In the event I cannot figure out the classification system, I fallback to this solution.

Some libraries supposedly collect statistics on books used in the building, measured by counting books in the to-be-reshelved area, for use when lobbying for funding.

Have you read Patrick Rothfuss' Name of the Wind?

The Arcanum from it is a librarian's nightmare, I wondered what you thought of the description / if you've ever worked in a library that's too big to sort properly.

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