I live in a town, Ann Arbor, that values reading. We have a handful of lovely bookstores; we have several handfuls of excellent university and public libraries. We also have a number of Little Free Libraries, six of which I walk or drive by fairly regularly. In the past few weeks I’ve picked up Don DeLillo’s Zero K, William Skidelsky’s Federer and Me, and Berkeley Breathed’s Mars Needs Moms! I read Mars Needs Moms! just before starting to write this post; my kids will likely laugh over it this evening. The reason for the Martians’ mom-nabbing expedition: “They don’t have mothers on Mars, you know. Martians grow motherless from the ground like potatoes.”
DeLillo’s new novel was already on my radar, but the Skidelsky confessional (his interest in Federer morphs into a kind of cheerful obsession) was new to me. I read most of it last week, around the same time Federer was making his run at Wimbledon. Federer didn’t quite complete his run, and I haven’t quite finished the book (I’m on page 175, smack in the middle of Skidelsky’s detailed account of the 2008 Wimbledon men’s final). I can’t say I’ve learned much about Federer that I didn’t already know from having watched him over the years, or from having read David Foster Wallace’s “Roger Federer as Religious Experience” and Brian Phillips’s “The Sun Never Sets: On Roger Federer, Endings, and Wimbledon.” (Here’s a nugget from Phillips that reliably makes me laugh: “His smiling-ambassador-luxury-Dubai-string-quartet persona somehow coheres into a personality, albeit one that makes white leather seem tasteful and that favors a one-handed backhand less for sporting reasons than because it’s what the Hapsburgs would have done.”) But I’m enjoying (if not quite agreeing with) Skidelsky’s dismissal of all players not named Federer. (He finds Rafael Nadal “loathsome, unforgivable”—mostly because of the Spaniard’s 23-11 career record versus his Swiss rival.) And I like how the book came into my life: randomly, like a gift from the Free Library gods.
Last summer I picked up two books from Little Free Libraries that ended up meaning a lot to me: Joan Didion’s Blue Nights, a devastating account of the death of Didion’s daughter, Quintana; and Chris Raschka’s Yo! Yes?, a Caldecott Honor Book that helped my younger daughter learn to talk. (The book tracks the developing alliance between two friendless boys. In its final three pages, the boys shout: “Yo!” “Yes!” “Yow!” My daughter would yo-yes-yow right along with them.) These books shine a bit brighter in my memory because of how I acquired them. I buy lots of books, and check out even more from the public library, that I never end up reading—and then I feel guilty for letting them pile up on my shelves. But these Free Library books don’t trigger that kind of self-reproach—and because I didn’t seek them out to begin with, I find myself drawn to them. It’s as if my too-rigid reading schedule has been upended. Who knows what may come next? Let serendipity rule! (This craving for the unexpected may account for why I prefer live radio to iTunes playlists, and live sports to scripted television shows.)
I’ll have more to say about Little Free Libraries in my next post. Until then, here’s a photo of one of the libraries near my house. If you were to wander around the United States (and beyond), you could find over 40,000 more of them. Following a week that offered nothing but bad news, both nationally and internationally, that figure gives me hope.
