Pop 89: The Book Box
By Madonna Hamel
madonnahamel@hotmail.com
My sister and brother-in-law and I left their home for our afternoon hike just as the box arrived in the post. “It’s The Book Box!” my sister squealed. The Book Box has become a ritual for me since I’ve discovered a warehouse book company with a quirky selection of books I send myself or a family member every few months. This particular selection contains the Lissa Evans trilogy, novels about life in pre-and post WWII London during the Blitz. I convinced my sister her book club would love Old Baggage, the first in the series, about an aging suffragette alarmed at the behaviours of young women in the late 1920s. Evans mixes history, humour and imagery with a gentle touch. I devoured the sequels “Crooked Heart” and “V for Victory.” I would not have known about her if not for stumbling upon her books on the site.
The site is the next best thing to a favourite out-of-the-way secondhand shop. And while it cannot replace the experience of hours spent perusing the dark shelves of dusty shops, it does put the reader in the position of having to take what she can get. And I like to read that way. It’s as enriching and exciting as walking around a new town without a map: I inevitably come upon a pleasant surprise that I’d otherwise never have encountered if I’d armed myself with a list and an itinerary. (However, if you are in Swift Current, check out the SPCA bookstore!)
In art school, I had a mentor, a painter in his eighties, who encouraged us to wander through libraries and shops and randomly pull books from their shelves – allowing ourselves to be seduced by covers, bindings or haphazard positioning. Random, spontaneous encounters often lead to delightful and even career-altering discoveries, he said. My older sister refers to this sort of book-choosing as bibliomancy. Before grabbing the alluring book, she will pose it a question and then flip open to find the answer in the first phrase her eyes land on.
Today so many of our choices are made for us. From music to movies to meals to friends - technology has done a great deal of the footwork for us, removing chance, “curating” our lives according to algorithms and check boxes. So, The Book Box is my antidote to a choreographed reality. It’s neither an expensive nor dangerous risk. I’ve received as many as eleven books for 45$. (After 45$ shipping is free.) And it’s the gift that just keeps giving: from the moment you receive the Canada Post white card to the tearing open of the flaps to the oohing and awing as you lift the golden eggs from their cardboard nest to the settling into the couch for a month’s worth of reading.
Home from our walk, we fetch the mail and rip open the box. And here’s what we find: 1) A graphic comic book interpretation of Edgar Allen Poe’s “The Raven,” a gift for my nephew, who is an illustrator, 2) My sister’s book club book, “Old Baggage” (2017) plus the sequel. 3) “Light the Dark” (2018) “Writers on Creativity, Inspiration, and the Artistic Process.” The book asks authors from Marilynne Robinson to Jeff Tweedy to Billy Collins the question: What inspires you? Collins says he’s inspired by poetry’s loyalty to intimacy in a day and age when people post “every banality from I’m going out for pizza to Joe is passed out on the couch.” In this book, I know I will find new writers whose novels, poetry and memoirs I will seek out. 4) “Soul of A Citizen” ( 1999, 2010) by Paul Rogat Loeb. Here’s a book I’ve been meaning to read since 1999. The subtitle is “Living with Conviction in Challenging Times.” I’ve been meaning to read it since I noticed that we humans were, as a collective, no longer referred to by media and academia as “souls” or even as “citizens” but were spoken of as “consumers.” (Today, thanks to technocracy, we are referred to as “users.”) I grabbed it when it showed up on the site. 5) “Places and Names” (2019) by Elliot Ackerman. Ackerman once worked in special ops for the US Marines. One day, as a journalist, he found himself in a Syrian refugee camp, sitting across from a man who fought for al-Qaeda in Iraq. A conversation ensued. This is not a book it would occur to me to look for, but I am very glad to have found it. As one reviewer says: “Ackerman’s voice is the voice of someone who knows too much; read him at your own risk, ignore him at your peril.”6) “Indian Givers”, by Jack Weatherford. Subtitled “How Native Americans Transformed the World”, (1988, 2010). This book, in its second printing, sets the historical record straight as to where Western notions and practices of democracy, medicine, urban planning, etc. came from. 7) “The Lost Diaries of Susanna Moodie” (2017) by Cecily Ross. This is a novel (so it has no lengthy explanatory subtitle) which cleverly takes its cues from a real diary and expands on the inner life of its author. 8) “My Name is Mary Sutter,” (2011) by Robin Oliveira. Mary Sutter is about a young midwife who wants to be a surgeon at the outbreak of the American Civil war. She is constantly rejected until the war, and the horrific loss of life and lack of care - no serious preparation or thought was given to bedding or water or even food for the wounded - pushes her immediately into the world of emergency medicine.
Books are my friends. But they are no replacement for precious time spent with family. And so, I spent the next couple of days hanging out with the people I love. In our conversations, we talked about how some of our favourite books came to us, left behind in a hotel room or laundromat. That’s the idea behind The Book Box: always leave some room for the unexpected delight!