Eclectic Bookshelf: Moonlit Metaphors

Clothes, the old saw goes, make the man (or the person). Books, perhaps, help make (or shape) the mind. In that regard, when it comes to choosing one's mental companions, it is often true that new books are easy to love. They're fresh-faced, pretty young things, with their whole life stretching out before them. To borrow from John Patrick Shanley, they're like moonlight in a martini: elusive, intriguing, and captivating. Old books, like the rich, are different; one need only spend a few hours in a used book store to realize that it may well take an act of the will to love the brittle pages and lifeless covers of ages past.

Like many fellow travelers, I have loved and left many books of both varieties. I have purged my shelves of many former compatriots over the years, abandoning them to the care of the strangers at the local thrift store or the patrons of the occasional garage sale. I have also benefited greatly from the purges of others, be it the rare garage sale find, the worthy used item, or an outright gift.

Years ago, I received a box of books: a virtually complete paperback set of the works of Edgar Rice Burroughs, along with a few other nuggets of early 20th-century science fiction (Buck Rogers in the 25th Century and the books of Otis Albert Kline, for example). The box also included a slew of military books, with subjects such as the battle of Stalingrad and the Flying Tigers.

I loved those books. To be sure, Burroughs had a tendency to become repetitive, somewhat like the westerns of Louis L'Amour (and speaking as someone who will actually cop to having read every one of L'Amour's books except Bendigo Shafter, I believe I am a worthy witness to this truth). But Burroughs could also be quite entertaining; to this day I still remember Tarzan Triumphant, undoubtedly my favorite Tarzan novel, and The Mad King, which is one of those ubiquitous "I'm a king with a royal double I never knew about" stories that were probably less of a cliché a century ago than they are today. As for Kline - well, his take on the whole "let's have a guy go to another planet and become king of the aliens and beat up the evil overlords" genre was actually a load of fun, albeit somewhat derivative of Burroughs' more successful John Carter books (or Carson Napier of Venus, for that matter).

Some books never quite leave your mind, let alone your possession. These books, these gifts, have traveled with me. They have been my companions across 20-plus years and countless miles; once in a box, left unopened for years, but now on a shelf, piled high and free, where I can visit them from time to time and return for a moment to those distant days when I explored those improbable alien lands for the first time.

This is not always the way of it, of course. The dog-eared copy of Stephen R. Donaldson's Lord Foul's Bane, which I read some 15 or more times in high school, fell by the wayside somewhere in between there and here, between then and now. It is like that as well for the box of books now in the back of my car, waiting impatiently for their new home somewhere other than the cramped, overflowing confines of the bookcases I can't seem to keep tidy. Some purges, it seems, are inevitable. Yet one must assume there is still something of Thomas Covenant rattling about inside my head; perhaps there is also something of the countless other characters, from Jack Pumpkinhead and Princess Ozma to the Riddle-Master of Hed or Dickens' pernicious Pip, who have each occupied an occasional parcel of mental real estate.

Article Author: W.E. Wallo

W.E. Wallo is a book and movie junkie whose writings have appeared in a variety of print and online publications.

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