What Nijma is reading

The one thing I haven’t got in my sidebar is one of those little widgets with a statement about what I’m reading and what I’m listening to. I’m not going to do one either, because it’s too much work.  Plus, the people who do them never change them, so it looks like they’re been reading the same book for a year.   I want to do an inventory though, so I’ll just list them.  Since I moved to a bigger apartment, I find I’m reading in two rooms instead of just one, so I’ll list the books by room.

On (or under) my bedside table:

Dorthy Sayers, Five Red Herrings

Sara Paretsky, Blacklist

Charles Dickens, Great Expectations

Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyyam tr. Edward Fitzgerald (published 1947) *

In the living room:

James Joyce, Ulysses (I found out there’s two different versions–one unexpurgated.  Don’t know which one I have.)

Beryl Markham, West with the Night

Hugh Kenner, The Pound Era (the only library book in the entire place)

Right away I’m going to admit to finishing the Paretsky book today and cross it out.  Then I’ll add a book I picked up and started reading today,

P.G. Wodehouse, Very Good, Jeeves.

This will go on (or under) the night stand, for sure.

The Paretsky had a surprise in  it. When I got back from Jordan I got Total Recall at a booksigning and as she signed my book, I told her about leaving her last novel in Jordan due to weight restrictions. Blacklist is the next one in line and guess what, two minor characters knew each other from “their Peace Corps days in Jordan”. I’d like to think she said hi to me in her book. Oh, and her birthday is the same day as A.J.P. Crown’s, June 8, 1947, only not the same year.

Up next? Looking at the list, I see I’ve gotten pretty far afield of my original interest in the middle east. I have a couple by Fatima Mernissi, whose insight into Middle East culture I have been impressed by before. I also now have Natalie Zemon Davis’ Trickster Travels, about the 16th century Muslim world. For theologians, I have the rogue Bishop John Shelby Spong as well as Marcus Borg. And a freshly signed copy of Salman Rushdie’s The Enchantress of Florence, for a look at Machiavelli’s time.

And what am I listening to? Pimsleur’s Arabic language tapes. Annie Lennox’s Medusa, and Leonard Cohen’s Hallelujah on YouTube. Over and over.

Yes, I’ve gotten *very* sidetracked into western literature, trying to see them through the eyes of bloggers who devour them, but who knows, maybe that’s not a Bad Thing.

*Update: the Rubiyat is now online. You can read all five versions, compare one version of a verse with another, and even make comments. But how can that ever compare with handling something like this–a cloth bound book that is older than I am:

Book binge

I should be transplanting stuff–last night was supposed to be a big frost night but this area is too near the lake to have been affected much, oh, maybe a touch on the more exotic varieties of impatients, so I don’t have a lot of time left if I want to move some plants.

Instead, I have just found out about a book sale, a 20% teacher discount at Half Price books, no doubt in honor of Leif Erikson Day. When I was in Minneapolis last month, I was introduced to Half Price Books. Everyone recommended it. Oh, sure, I thought, I’ve seen those half price stores before, overpriced factory seconds of stuff no one wants to read. Fortunately I postponed my book shopping until I was almost ready to leave, or I wouldn’t have visited with anyone at all. The bookstore turns out to be a used bookstore, better than Dinkytown’s university strip bookstores, and better even than Chicago’s Powell’s and the little rare book store next to Florian’s near the U of C. And it’s a chain with stores in 17 different states. Yes, there are 5 in the Chicago area, and the closest one is about an hour away from where I live.

*shrug*

What can I do?

UPDATE: After poking around the bookstore, I am in a slightly better mood and no longer snarking about tomorrow’s Columbus Day holiday. I have now taken possession of, inter alia, an Arabic dictionary, Freya Stark’s 1939 The Valleys of the Assassins and, a book I have been searching for for a long time, Strunk and White’s The Elements of Style. Not only did I find several copies of the third edition and one of the fourth edition, but the copy I finally obtained has Maira Kalman’s illustrations (recommended by AJP at A Bad Guide). Now I can see for myself what all the linguists’ prescriptivist/descriptivist fuss is all about. And yes, I did just end that last sentence with a preposition. And that last one too.

From the introduction to the Stark book:

An imaginative aunt who, for my ninth birthday, sent a copy of the Arabian nights, was, I suppose, the original cause of trouble.

Unfostered and unnoticed, the little flame so kindled fed secretly on dreams.  Chance, such as the existence of a Syrian missionary near my home, nourished it; and Fate, with long months of illness and leisure, blew it to a blaze bright enough to light my way through labyrinths of Arabic, and eventually to land me on the coast of Syria at the end of 1927.

Here, I thought, all difficulty was over: I had now but to look around me, to learn, and to enjoy.

And so I would have been had not those twin Virtues so fatal to the joie de vivre of our civilized West, the sense of responsibility and the illusion, dear to well-regulated minds, that every action must have a purpose–had not these virtues of Responsibility and Purpose met me at every step with the embarrassing enquiry: “Why are you here alone? and: What do you intend to do?”

I may confess at once that I had never thought of why I came, far less of why I came alone: and as to what I was going to do–I saw no cause to trouble about a thing so nebulous beforehand.  My sense of responsibility was in effect deficient, and purpose non-existent.

When excessively badgered, the only explanation I could think of for being so unwantedly in Asia was an interest in Arabic grammar–a statement rarely accepted in that candid spirit in which I offered it to unconvinced inquirers.

I came to the conclusion that some more ascetic reason than mere enjoyment should be found if one wishes to travel in peace: to do things for fun smacks of levity, immorality almost, in our utilitarian world.  And though personally I think the world is wrong, and I know in my heart of hearts that it is a most excellent reason to do things merely because one likes the doing of them, I would advise all those who wish to see unwrinkled brows in passport offices to start out ready labeled as entomologists, anthropologists, or whatever other -ology they think suitable and propitious.

I do think I’m going to enjoy Ms. Stark’s company.

Snippets: “sumu tsoho” and Joyce

Some fragments that don’t fit anywhere:

Sumu tsoho

The latest Ramadan saying is sumu tsoho صوموا تصحوا or “it’s good for your health” (possibly part of a longer Koranic passage?). The idea is your children might not want to fast just because Allah wants them to. So you give them another reason.  Good reasons and real reasons, as it were.  Only which is which?  I can imagine cave people saying, “Oh, they’ll never believe in germs, tell them the gods want them to do it.”  I’ve been getting this one on the back channels, and it’s working so far–I’ve now completed a third day of fasting where I only intended to do two.  It’s cutting into my exercise, so we’ll see how it goes. I don’t believe the “so-and-so lowered their blood sugar by fasting” business.  That would be only temporary, plus the potential elevated insulin levels would be immediately life-threatening, and not just damaging in the long term, as uncontrolled blood sugar levels would be.  It would be interesting to know more about the physiology of fasting.  I do like the idea of breaking habits, in this case by substituting with other habits from Ramadan in other years. And don’t forget “placebo effect”. The mind-body connection is well documented, but poorly understood.  If you believe you will become closer to God, and you carry out the very physical steps to accomplish it, can anyone say you will not become purified and enter some type of jenna?

Joyce

I want to continue to document my progress with Joyce’s Ulysses, partly to make sure I keep some focus on it, publicly, and increase my chances of completing it. I am still reading Stephen Hero, which by everyone’s account is an unhelpful digression, yet I continue to be engaged with this in a way I could not get engaged with Ulysses when I first picked it up. Stephen Hero was meant to be the writer’s personal notebook so to me it represents a backstory about what he is trying to accomplish by his writing and how he comes to the conclusions he comes to.  You can also get some idea of his writing process, since the editor notes the marks that Joyce made on the manuscript, crossing out words and delineating chapters.

The writing style is more accessible, but already some of the things that were barrier to my reading of Ulysses are being used here. The punctuation for the conversation is  bit off-putting. Joyce uses an indent, then a long dash and a space to indicate change of speakers.  At least I think that’s what it indicates.  Other writers have used similar marks for things that were not conversation. (I’m trying to remember where I saw it–was something similar used for the pronouncements of Zeus or the thoughts of a spirit in a play?) The effect is more like the characters are thinking instead of speaking. Also in long strings of dialogue, you lose track of who is speaking.  Slowly I am getting used to it, and it doesn’t cause such an abrupt break in the momentum of the reading as it did at first.

Joyce also makes frequent use of the word O, but used in the sense of “oh” and not as the evocative “O” that is still found in traditional English (O little town of Bethlehem, O Holy Night). Could it be an archaic usage?

But consider something like this, where Joyce’s protagonist is considering a major essay he will present for his coursework:

He could not persuade himself that, if he wrote round about his subject with facility or treated it from any standpoint of impression, good would come of it.  On the other hand he was persuaded that no-one served the generation into which he had been born so well as he who offered it, whether in his art or in his life, the gift of certitude.

“Certitude”, yes, now I have had to dig out my computer netbook and prop it next to my hooka for a few lookups  (naïf? soutane?) which seem to be necessary to even get through this early book of Joyce’s. According to Answers.com:

The noun has one meaning:

Meaning #1: total certainty or greater certainty that circumstances warrant
Synonyms: cocksureness, overconfidence

It’s the old writing advice. Delete all the “I think” type modifiers and qualifiers that dilute your viewpoint and make you sound insecure.  Forget the “if you meet the Buddha on the road, kill him” philosophy.  Even if your subject is vague and unknowable, state everything with confidence.  Become the Buddha.  Did anyone ever receive a paycheck for not knowing something?

Today’s project, no, really.

This is today’s project. All week I have been obtaining and transporting bookshelves–these were on sale for $15–and now is the time to put it all together.

I’m not going to procrastinate.

And this time I really mean it.

After :

Zinzin Road

I can never resist anything with the word “road” in the title. There’s the Kipling poem “Road to Mandalay”, Kerouac’s beat generation epic “On the Road”, and Frost’s poem “The Road Not Taken.”  I’m also intrigued by any word with the letter “z” in it.  It brings to mind such exotic references as the well “Zem-Zem” in Mecca (I have tasted water from this well, brought back by a pilgrim) and the Zagazig puzzle from the Fu Manchu book series, an encrypted message based on an Egyptian town with that name.  So when I saw the title “The Road to Zinzin” on the shelf of the local Unique Boutique second hand store, my 35¢ was as good as spent.

The Road to Zinzin by Fletcher Kniebel, published in 1966, turns out to be a Peace Corps book.  It is written in an engaging style–lots of characters and conversations–so it’s going to be an easy read.  And I have known plenty of Peace Corps volunteers–most recently I dated a guy who had been in western Africa, the setting for this book–so the settings and situations grab me immediately.

Here’s a great snippet of conversation:

“I accept,” said Lew.  “Some day, though, when I’ve got a paying job, I’m going to write to you for my board bill.”

“Forget it,” said Stevenson. “Feeding the Peace Corps is one of the few worthwhile things I do.”

May Allah bless all the Stevensons of this world.

Other situations will also be familiar to volunteers.  One volunteer (only one?) has an intestinal affliction and must leave the room suddenly.  Volunteers use the local expressions and customs when greeting each other. There is a volunteer from Mt. Holyoke. Corruption is rampant in the country: supplies meant for schools get derailed, officials think of reasons to charge locals for non-existent services, and volunteers’ housing is owned by locals with ties to the agencies involved  who make a killing on the rents. The narrator’s life in-country gets complicated by someone with local influence.

Other situations are not as easily recognizable. Volunteers have political discussions and criticize the local government instead of being incurious about the country they find themselves in. They drive motorcycles instead of taking public transportation. They live clustered together in one village and not isolated where they can be immersed in the culture. They don’t learn the local language, except for one guy who has “gone native” (doesn’t PC have the best and most intensive language program in the world?). The emphasis is on development, not cultural exchange (this must have been before the wording of the PC goals was officially changed). There is a staffer who drives around and brings their mail instead of having it get lost in the country’s postal system or forgetting  it in a corner of the Peace Corps office.  And the staffer actually cares about the volunteers’  malfunctioning appliances instead of how many times a week they can get into the embassy swimming pool.  The volunteers in the fictional account actually stay in Peace Corps for the whole two years.  Although the Peace Corps doesn’t publish its attrition rates, in my experience, at least 50% of real volunteers are gone within a year.

Already there is an inter-racial romance in the plot, quite edgy for the  60’s, but likely to be pretty ho-hum by 2009 standards. But after living through the 70’s, 80’s, and 90’s, I’m ready to go back in time and peer through this little window to the 60’s.  Take me home,  Zin-zin road.

Here’s one reflection from a volunteer in the book that  isn’t dated:

Maybe in two years out here I haven’t helped Kalya or the U.S. much, but I’ve sure learned a lot about myself and other people, and that’s worth the price of admission.

Book list for women’s rights

On a late night thread, the discussion turned to books about women’s rights and politics. Here are my recommendations.  I am also emailing this list to the person who wants to stock their bookshelf.   A lot of the books are from the 60’s.

For books, I remember two classics from the 60’s: Sisterhood is Powerful, an anthology, and Century of Struggle about winning the vote (you can’t even say “suffrage” any more because they don’t know what that means) and there’s a lot in there about women in trade unions too.

Here is the Amazon review for Sisterhood is Powerful, ed. Robin Morgan with the red fist on the cover. Out of print and there are several more modern ones by Morgan, but I don’t know anything about them to recommend or not.

http://www.amazon.com/Sisterhood-Powerful-Anthology-Writings-Liberation/dp/0394705394/ref=sr_1_3?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1226986503&sr=8-3

This was the eye-opening book, the manifesto, the “click” that happened when you suddenly saw your situation from the outside and realized the deck was stacked. It was divided into sections by topic, politics, psychology, sexuality, lesbians…so you could start with something you were interested in and work into the other stuff that was more difficult or controversial later.  This is probably really dated, birth control was new at the time, but it was a classic.

I don’t know that I’m recommending (since it’s out of print) so much as putting it out there for discussion since it was so influential.

Here is Century of Struggle, the history of the battle for the vote by Eleanor Flexner. The version I read was much older with a different cover. For me this is required reading and I see someone else reviewed it by saying “required reading” too. I would worry that it isn’t dumbed down enough for today’s crowd though. At least this one has stayed in print. Nice index too.

http://www.amazon.com/Century-Struggle-Womans-Movement-Enlarged/dp/0674106539/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1226987106&sr=8-1

I am reminded of what the African Americans I used to work with used to say, “No one gives you your rights voluntarily–you have to take them.”

Of course you want The Feminist Papers, ed. Alice Rossi. Not exactly readable but has all the documents from Abagail Adams to Mary Wollstonecraft to British feminists and a description of Seneca Falls Convention.  If you need to quote something historical, this is the reference to have:

http://www.amazon.com/Feminist-Papers-Adams-Beauvoir/dp/1555530281/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1226991016&sr=8-1

I don’t know if anyone is looking for religion/goddess type historical stuff but I love Barbara G. Walker’s The Woman’s Encyclopedia of Myths and Secrets.  At first glance this one looks like it’s way out there, and you say to yourself, “Oh I have that reference and what she’s saying just isn’t in there”, then you pull your copy off the shelf to make sure and it’s in there all right–down in a foot note–you just never connected the dots.
http://www.amazon.com/Womans-Encyclopedia-Myths-Secrets/dp/006250925X/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1226991657&sr=8-1

In a similar vein but not as comprehensive, is Merlin Stone’s When God was a Woman with some archaeological conjecture—lots of biblical references to ancient goddesses too. Still, I enjoyed reading it– since you won’t hear that sort of evidence from male archaeologists.
http://www.amazon.com/When-God-Woman-Merlin-Stone/dp/015696158X/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1226992022&sr=8-1

Also, textbooks on Public Administration and maybe Personnel often have sections on women, especially in light of legal changes for those who have to follow the law in hiring practices (hostile workplace environment, anyone?) without necessarily having a law background.  Sometimes there’s a rather interesting philosophical/theoretical discussion that goes with it.

Have fun.

Vintage 1969 Middle East Fanaticism Quotation

Before I go to sleep I like to read a few pages of something, anything, to take my mind away from the days events. This summer I have been reading Miles Copeland’s 1969 The Game of Nations: the Amorality of Power Politics, about Egypt’s leader Gamal Abdel Nasser and the events between his rise to power in 1952 and the 1967 Six Day War between the Arabs and Israel. Last night’s page was particularly effective. I fell asleep on page 206 (literally “on” the page) with all the lights on. I offer here a selection from p. 204:

A player of limited popular resources such as Nasser is understandably tempted to use fanatics, whereby, as has been proved time and again in history, small minorities can cause majorities to make concessions to them out of all proportion to their numbers or the strength of their arguments–if, indeed, they have any clear arguments at all. When entirely on their own (and this is rare), fanatics sooner or later make such nuisances of themselves that the majority clamps down on them, paying whatever price it takes. In the hands of nonfanatical leadership, however, they can become a weapon of flexibility and finesse. They can be brought to a halt just short of suicide, while their willingness to go to suicidal lengths is so manifestly genuine that the opponent cannot know where they will halt–or even be sure that they will halt. The nonsense they talk can be polished up so that it not only makes a modicum of sense, but seems to be on a high moral plane. So long as the more vocal members keep their mouths shut (or can be kept away from direct contact with journalists) a fanatical movement can be excellent public relations material. They are “a valiant body of men fighting for their beliefs against overwhelming odds.” They are sometimes as valuable dead as they are alive. They are beautifully expendable.

One hundred and two more pages left. It’s going to be a restful summer.

Note: for biographical information on Miles Copeland see here and here.

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Related posts:

Palestine just a pawn in Copeland’s 1952 Game of Nations

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Palestine just a pawn in Copeland’s 1952 Game of Nations

Every once in a while I like to read a really old book about what things were like in my youth before I paid so much attention to world politics. “The Ugly American” has long been a euphemism for the kind of American traveler who is insensitive to local culture, but when I picked up Lederer and Burdicks’ old novel by that title, I found it wasn’t about that at all, and in fact did explain a lot about the kind of political thinking that brought us both Vietnam and the Peace Corps. The story is about the imaginary country of Sarkan somewhere in Indochina, the domino theory, and winning hearts and minds. That was so much fun I read their 1965 sequel, Sarkan. Which is a perfect lead-in to Graham Greene’s The Quiet American, about behind-the-scenes U.S. /British 1960’s spy vs. spy competition in southeast Asia.

This weekend I have picked up something on the Middle East, Miles Copeland’s The Game of Nations published in 1969 about the events in the Middle East from 1947 through the 1967 Arab-Israeli war. The title reminded me of a chapter title about Jordan’s first King Abdullah in Kamal Salibi’s The Modern History of Jordan as well as Kipling’s espionage/spirituality novel Kim, where the protagonist learns about the “great game” while traveling with a holy man in search of a particularly spiritual river. Which, trust me on this, brings us through to the Palestinians.

The Game of Nations starts with the British announcement of their withdrawal from the “Pax Britannica” in the Middle East, withdrawing from Greece and Turkey at the beginning of the Cold War. American analysts scrambled to fill the void, as the wartime Office of Strategic Services changed to the Central Intelligence Group, which became the CIA, and America began to dabble in world change. In the fashion of someone sitting down to a poker game where they don’t know the players, Americans first tried betting a small hand, a military coup in Syria, believing that conflict with Arab countries was “almost entirely due to mischievous or misguided leadership.” The result was the Husni Za’im coup of 1949, followed by the Hennawi coup of 1949 masterminded by Shishakli, who ran the country through a series of front-men until he came to power in 1951, only to flee the country in another coup in 1954, until “”even those of us who know it well are unable to keep track of which predator is currently in charge.” Okay, so that was the Syria regime-change thing. Trust me, I’m still getting to the Palestinians.

Then we come to the Egypt. America had played out their regime-change hand in Syria and the result was massive instability. So in Egypt, still looking for the “right kind of leader” they formulated a series of “political realities” they believed any leader would have to observe to stay in power. One of them was a common enemy.

In this part of the world, Bertand Russell’s observation particularly applied: “A common peril is much the easiest way of producing homogeneity.” Elsewhere, Arab leaders were using the fear of Israel to bring about a degree of national unity; we saw no way of avoiding use of the same means in Egypt, provided there was minimal danger of stimulating emotions that might get out of hand–and the likelihood of this seemed small in view of the terrible defeat the Egyptian Army had received from the Israelis in the war in 1948. Besides, there seemed little chance of successfully promoting a leader who would not make use of the Arab-Israeli issue.

So this is what the U.S. was looking for in its search for the “Moslem Billy Graham”– someone who would use the Palestinians as a stepping stone for Egypt’s political stability. In behind the scenes talks with Nasser’s people before the successful coup, Nasser nixed that idea that “regaining Palestine” is a top priority in any given country.

After five years of tuning in on barrack-room conversation and talking individually to hundreds of officers, however, Nasser and his lieutenants decided almost the opposite. They realized that it might serve some later purpose to speak of “mobilizing Egypt’s resources so as to redress the wrongs of Palestine,” but that in early 1952 …their resentments were “against our own superior officers, other Arabs, the British and the Israelis–in that order.”

After Nasser’s successful Egyptian coup, his people were again in touch with American diplomats and eventually they came around to the American view of the necessity of using Israel as the scapegoat to unite the country:

This was followed up by more public assurances from the coup’s father figure, General Naguib, who at one point got carried away and passed the word to us that he ‘wasn’t interested in Palestine‘, although he called Ambassador Caffery only a few hours later to withdraw the statement and substitute for it something less suited to public consumption in the United States, but more in line with what Nasser, and we, knew was required for the new government to gain public acceptance.

So the Americans are the ones who took the lead in using the issue of Palestine as the common foe to unite Egyptians and provide the stability necessary to secure the strategic interest of Suez.

I still have another two hundred pages to go in the book, but I rather like Copeland so far. He doesn’t mind “disillusioning the public” or “revealing a lot of information which had best be forgotten” or “needlessly puncturing a view of our Government which it is best for the public to have.”

One thing I have been disillusioned about. When I was a senior in high school, we took a trip to the U.N. In our applications for the trip we had to write an essay about either zero population growth or world peace. Comparing notes later, all my friends wrote about zero population growth. I wrote about the “Report From Iron Mountain” hoax. It purported to be a report of policy thinkers who got together and discussed the economic benefits of WWII and decided that for economic reasons world peace was not desirable. After the expected outcry, the Iron Mountain report was revealed to be a hoax.

But it wasn’t a hoax after all. The “Peace Game” was real. In his book Copeland reveals it took place around a conference table in a Washington office of the State Department known as the “Games Center”. Author Miles Copeland knew Nasser personally and played the part of Nasser as the United States government “gamed out” international trends to predict their outcomes.

So from this can we infer the U.S. government believes that the other countries of the Middle East will always need a Palestine in turmoil to ensure their stability?

Shadows in the Dark: East Side Book Exchange is deserted.

Last summer I discovered a book exchange right in the middle of the forest preserve. It is little more than a metal cabinet spray-painted cobalt blue, with “East Side Book Exchange” stenciled at the top. An article in the local paper said the book exchange was maintained by someone who wanted to remain anonymous.

Through the last year the East Side Book Exchange has survived rain, fire and freezing, but last week I walked by the metallic blue painted cabinet and there were no books at all on the shelves. In the twilight I walked over to the shelves and felt the ridges of the words  painted into the top shelf.  “Shadows in the dark”.  Someone had traced the letters with their finger while the paint was still wet.

Today the bookshelf was still empty.  In the full daylight I could see gang signs painted on both sides of the shelf.   Was that why?  Someone routinely paints out gang signs on the surface of the bike trail, but it seemed like there were more of them today.  And my little Polish/Arab/Hispanic  neighborhood has never had gang signs;  this winter they appeared for the first time.

I am reminded of Pandora’s box.  After the box was opened and the demons escaped into the world, the box looked empty but there was still Hope in the bottom of the box. The   shelves of the East Side Book Exchange may seem empty, but they still contain the words, “Shadows in the dark.” Curious, that.  How can there be a shadow without a light source?

Guerrilla Book Exchange Survives Fire and Ice in Urban Forest Preserve

When I first moved to this neighborhood, I started walking for exercise. Step by step I discovered a forest preserve, a hidden pond where an occasional migrating swan can be seen, a stream where salmon swim uphill in season, and an abandoned WWII-era Nike missile site, which has now reverted back to public use. All of this is connected by miles of bike and foot paths, which is alternately maintained by a variety of state, county, and forest preserve entities.

Last summer I was exploring a new section of trail, when I happened on a bookshelf in the middle of the forest. That’s right. A huge three-shelf metal cabinet with books on the shelves, neatly wrapped in plastic bags. I made a mental note to bring some books out.

Then last fall someone spray-painted the bookshelf a metallic cobalt blue. Newly stenciled letters at the top of the cabinet announced that this was the “EAST SIDE BOOK EXCHANGE”. The book exchange was ready for winter.

Then one evening I was walking on the path with some books to donate and saw some sort of reflection in the distance. Another walker joined me on the path. He spoke no English but was a student at the same school where I teach. We walked quickly in the twilight, eager to be off the path and back in an area with streetlights before nightfall. As we reached the area of the book exchange, we could see there wasn’t a reflection, but a fire. Someone had piled up all the books and set fire to them in the middle of the path. We had probably surprised them. We worked quickly to contain the fire, spreading the books out on the  path and moving them to the side so bicycle and foot traffic could pass on one side. I left the books I had carried with me on the now-empty shelves in a symbolic gesture.Who would burn books, I thought, and a few days later brought out a copy of Fahrenheit 451.

In the following weeks the book exchange did indeed rise from the ashes like a phoenix. Someone cleaned up the scorched books. Park crews mowed a large area in front of the shelf. Throughout the winter people continued leaving books, even thought the temperature was sub-freezing and the path was difficult to negotiate.

Now the snow is mostly melted and the East Side Book Exchange has more books than ever. People are no longer wrapping the books in plastic though, and last weeks’ snowstorm left many of them warped from moisture and some of them on the ground. Gently I started picking books off the ground and laying them on the shelf to dry. Then a book caught my eye and I started skimming it right in the middle of the forest as if I was really in a library. I had to take it home to finish looking at it. So now I am now a borrower too, and the guerrilla forest book exchange has come full circle.