dusty

Many things can, and often do, disturb my reading: bad lighting, an uncomfortable seat, too much talking or not enough, the wrong type of music. Then there are problems having to do with the book itself. The story's boring or the style is bloated, the book's spine doesn't bend right, the font is hard to read or the pages are too thin and I can pick up the writing on the other side of the page (Norton anthologies.) I become confused and agitated, have trouble concentrating. But the most crippling obstruction for me is dust.

At first everything seems normal and then my nose begins to run. I wipe my nose on my hand (which is now dusty from holding the book), my nose runs even more, and my face starts to itch. Most of the time the books I read are clean enough that this is not much of a problem--I'm careful now about smelling the used books that I buy to check how dusty they are even if they otherwise are undamaged.

I can remember a few books that were dusty enough to make me miserable while reading, most recently Stendhal's Scarlet and Black, which always left me itchy and snotty. It happened most distinctly while reading Henry James' Portrait of a Lady. Even now, when I ask myself whether I liked the novel or not, I think, "Well, it was so dusty." I have almost no recollection of what happened in Portrait of a Lady, and had almost no recollection immediately after finishing it, and I blame this in large part on the dust.

Several years ago I lived for a summer behind a used bookstore and, several times, went through their dumpsters at night. After sitting in the sun for a summer day, the dumpsters were quite warm, and warmer still since I would close the lid back down once I was inside. One of the books I found in the dumpster was Saturday by Ian McEwan and, sure enough, when I read it my nose always ran.