Old, new, borrowed, true

As in: books, books, books, books

Random book pile from back in the day

Back in the Periscope days—remember that fifteen minutes?—I invented a little rubric for myself to make it easy to jump on and do a quick livestream. It was a great hook! People loved it! Only trouble was, at the time I had approximately eighty-seven young children (okay, only six), and the one room quiet enough for me to record in had terrible lighting. After about three weeks I remembered that writing has much lower production values and you don’t have to brush your hair.

So I bailed on Periscope, but I still like that old rubric. It went like this, playing (obviously) on the wedding rhyme:

Something old,
something new,
something borrowed,
something true.

True, not blue, because I was talking about books. The idea was to share one book that fit each category. That is:

Old: a beloved backlist title or classic.
New: self-explanatory!
Borrowed: a library book.
True: nonfiction.

I’d run around the house grabbing books to share. My picks for the borrowed and new categories were usually children’s books. Those were the years when we had picture books coming out our ears—boxes of review copies arriving every week from various publishers. And yet still we managed to fill a bag at the library every week. Junkies!

I lost the full-size version of this pic ages ago, but the crop makes me laugh

The true pick usually went to an adult nonfiction title, probably something I was reading parts of to the older kids, or a gardening book, or a title related to whatever novel I was researching at the time.

I think the old category was my favorite, because it meant I got to enthuse about some beloved backlist book—and those are the books that most need enthusing about, lest they be altogether forgotten and slip out of print. The very best part of those Periscopes was finding out in the comments that people had tracked down some of my picks from previous weeks. The more people who read Carol Kendall and Helene Hanff, the better.

If I had to pick books for the game today, what would I choose?

Old: I mean, that’s gotta be Middlemarch. I’m obsessed. Last week’s

FrizzLit

Book Club chapters took me along numerous rabbit trails, including one about pond life and pollen grains. Thanks to George Eliot, I learned about something called “Brownian motion” (the random motion of certain particles—pollen, for example—suspended in liquid), a phenomenon first written about by Scottish botanist Robert Brown in an 1827 pamphlet. In Middlemarch, Dr. Lydgate gives a copy of Brown’s article to Mr. Farebrother. The big mystery was: what was causing the particles’ movement—were they alive? Or were there mysterious unseen forces at work? The puzzle was solved by one Albert Einstein in 1905. I could go on (and on! because I think Eliot is having a ton of fun playing with this concept of the invisible societal forces at play on her characters! and also her soulmate George Lewes was writing lots of articles about pond life and the value of studying the world through a microscope around the same time that Eliot was writing Middlemarch!) but my posts are always too long. Always!

New: A copy of

Beth Kempton

’s new book, Kokoro, just arrived from Blackwell’s Books.¹ I read about it in this post:

I lit a candle, made some tea, and listened for traces of my family’s laughter soaked into the walls of our tiny rented machiya. There is a beautiful term in Japanese, hikikomogomo (悲喜交々), which means having alternating feelings of joy and sorrow in your heart, tasting the bittersweetness of life. I had felt this often over the past few months, and it lingered in our little house once my family had gone. Love and loss, frustration and laughter, shadow and light, numbness and aliveness, shattering and gratitude.

I know that feeling. Really looking forward to reading this one.

Borrowed: Here’s one from my Libby account: Ann Patchett’s Tom Lake. Have you read it? I haven’t yet. It’s about to be returned and I can’t go airplane mode for work-related reasons, so I’d better get cracking. The cover is swoony and I think it involves a production of Our Town, which I’ve been meaning to read with the kids. In high school I played Rebecca Gibbs, and far away on the other side of the country, Scott played Joe the paperboy. Were you even an ’80s teen if your drama club didn’t do Our Town?

Curtain call, fall of ’82. Can you spot me?

True: Still reading Outside Lies Magic with Huck and Rilla. I think the Main Street chapter is next. Should be fun.

I would loooove to hear your old/new/borrowed/true picks for this week!

1. I love ordering from Blackwell’s. Makes me feel like Helene Hanff!