Barry Trott, Editor
Duncan Smith, Guest Columnist
Print version (Adobe Reader required)
In our daily practice as readers’ advisors, we generally focus on the immediate issue at hand—getting a book into the hands of a particular reader. This is as it should be, and we need to be facile at providing our readers with appropriate suggestions that are based on our discussion with them about what appeals to them about their reading. It is also important, though, to step back occasionally and to think about how readers, rather than an individual reader, respond to what they read. Here, Duncan Smith describes his experience in working with a reader over the past two decades in which he recorded her talking about her reading experience. Smith moves from the individual to the universal in suggesting that a better understanding of the reading experience will allow readers’ advisors to make more thoughtful suggestions to our readers. Smith is the creator and product manager of EBSCO Publishing’s electronic readers’ advisory resource NoveList. He inaugurated this column in the Winter 2000 issue of this journal, when Mary K. Chelton was its editor, with his article “Talking with Readers.”—Editor
Ruiz Zafon’s Shadow of the Wind opens with the ten-year-old main character Daniel, awakening from a dream—a nightmare really. The nature of Daniel’s bad dream is that he can no longer remember his mother’s face. Daniel’s mother had died six years earlier as a result of a cholera epidemic. Daniel’s father runs a bookshop, and that may explain his unusual solution for calming his son’s fears.
The father takes his son to a secret and magical place called the Cemetery of Forgotten Books. You enter the cemetery through a carved wooden door “blackened by time and humidity.”1 To Daniel’s eyes, the cemetery appears to be “a carcass of a palace, a place of echoes and shadows.”
For Daniel’s father and his colleagues who attend the Cemetery of Forgotten Books, “books have souls—the soul of the person who wrote it and of those who read it and lived and dreamed with it.” Books are brought to the cemetery when they are no longer remembered. There they “live forever waiting for the day when they will reach a new reader’s hands.”
It is a tradition at the Cemetery of Forgotten Books that whenever someone enters its rooms for the first time, they choose a book to adopt and make a lifelong promise to keep the book alive by reading it, ensuring that it will never be forgotten again.
Daniel’s path to the book he adopts is reminiscent of the way many readers find books in libraries. He roams through row after row of shelves until a title catches his eye. In his case, it is a “timid” volume sitting on the corner of a shelf bound in wine-colored leather with gold letters. Just like the readers who roam the stacks in our libraries, Daniel pulls the book off the shelf, flips through a few pages, tucks the book under his arm and heads home.
Back home, Daniel starts to read the book to which he has made a lifelong commitment. As he reads the opening lines, Daniel experiences what happens to all of us when we start reading not just a book but the right book. Once he starts reading, he cannot stop. He reads through the afternoon, through the evening. The world of the book becomes as real to him as the world of his room. He doesn’t stop until he is finished, and once he is done he remembers something that one of his father’s regular customers had said:
Few things leave a deeper mark on a reader than the first book that finds its way into his heart. Those first images, the echo of words we think we have left behind accompany us throughout our lives and sculpt a palace in our memory to which sooner or later no matter how many books we read, how many worlds we discover or how much we learn or forget—we will return.
For Daniel, the book he adopted from the Cemetery of Forgotten Books was the book that found its way into his heart. The book’s author was unknown to Daniel—Julian Carax. What happens over the course of Daniel’s story is that the lives of the characters of his chosen book and his own life begin to parallel and merge. It is unclear what the nature of this relationship is. Is Daniel’s life shaping the story that he reads, or is the story he reads shaping his life? It is one of the mysteries of this engaging novel.
And what is the title of this book by the unknown author, Julian Carax that has such a hold on Daniel? The title is The Shadow of the Wind.
The Palace of Memory
The image of reading that is put forth in the opening pages of Zafon’s novel is one in which a book that is loved exerts an influence on and shapes the reading of other titles. This image of reading is not limited to The Shadow of the Wind. It is present in the lives of our readers. We can see it operating in the life of a particular reader that I have studied over the past eighteen years. Starting in 1991, I began videotaping Joanne talking about books she has read and enjoyed. Each taping took place in her home and began with my asking the question that Joyce Saricks suggests we start all readers’ advisory conversations with: “Tell me about a book you read and enjoyed.”2 In 1991, when I asked this question of Joanne, she described her experience of reading Pat Conroy’s The Prince of Tides:
I really liked the book The Prince of Tides by Pat Conroy. I was really surprised that I liked it because about 80 percent of the books I read are by or about women, and I’m skeptical also about people who write about the South because I’m a Southerner, and I often feel that when people write about the South, they distort it. This book was recommended to me by a friend and I reluctantly read it, and when I did, I couldn’t put it down. It was like I couldn’t eat, I couldn’t sleep—I just had to read this book.
It’s about, to use today’s lingo, a dysfunctional family, and it’s dysfunctional beyond anything you could imagine. There’s two brothers and a sister and a mother and a father and some grandparents who are just basically crazy. And it’s very, very funny; very, very, beautiful; and very, very tragic all at the same time. It’s just this strange mix of people and events set in the marshes that I just love.3