It’s one thing to say that there’s a book you want to read; it’s another thing to find it.
I’ve written about my current big reading project, reading a book for every state of the USA. I’m currently halfway through book #45 of this (Fight Club by Chuck Palahniuk, representing Delaware, thanks for asking.) The last five books after it seem to be easy to lay my hands on, but it’s been such a long journey I’m reluctant to count all 50 chickens just yet.
It’s taken years to get as far as I have, years filled with hunting through second-hand bookshops, poring over library catalogues, and a few digital downloads.
At first, when I made my list, I just sat there and looked at it admiringly. Such fine books! Such pleasure in store! Then I quickly grabbed To Kill a Mockingbird off my bookshelf – Alabama’s the first state alphabetically, so that seemed like a great place to start. And it was! What a delight to spend time with Scout and Jem Finch as they grow up in their small town, learning how different people can be, from the reclusive Boo Radley in the house next door, to Tom Robinson, on trial for his life.
There were twelve books on my list that I already owned. That meant thirty-eight had to be found elsewhere. Unfortunately, I’m not made of money, and couldn’t simply request that my bookshop order in new copies of each of the thirty-eight. But, you know, the hunt is part of the pleasure…
I checked through the local library catalogue, and saw they had some of the missing ones, but major gaps still remained in my project. (The library couldn’t locate their copy of East of Eden, for instance.) Every year, there are a couple of community fundraising second-hand book sales I go to, and I’d attend with list in hand, looking for those missing titles. I found … a few, including, to my delight, a $2 copy of that John Steinbeck the library hadn’t been able to provide. I also tried second-hand stores. I don’t live in the USA, but we’re fortunate to have a second-hand bookshop in town with the largest stock holdings in the country. And yet, even they lacked some of the books I’d set my sights on.
The difficulty was frustrating, but other books came my way to make up for it – I didn’t go to those community book sales with just the 50 states in mind. Time went by, and many months passed without any of the reading project books coming my way. The list became buried, and crowded out of my life, with well over twenty states still to find. Would I ever return to it? Perhaps it was too big to ever complete
Then my wife and I made a long-delayed trip to New York. We saw all the famous sights, went to shows and ate fabulous food. What didn’t occur to me until we arrived, was that somewhere in New York, surely, I could find those most elusive books.
Unfortunately, I had come without my list, and couldn’t recall the titles that proved to be the most elusive of all, but there were three I remembered – books representing Texas, Hawaii and Pennsylvania.
We went to Strand’s flagship store, down at the Greenwich Village end of Broadway. Boasting more than 2.5 million books, we spent some pleasant hours wandering the shelves. Gradually, I gravitated to the second-hand section, and there they were: Matthew Quick’s Silver Linings Playbook, H G Bissinger’s Friday Night Lights and Kaui Hart Hemmings’ The Descendants. Tick, tick, tick. So, so easy. If only I could live here forever!
Back home, I read those three, and then gradually whittled away the rest of the list, until there were only two books I couldn’t locate, the books representing Illinois (The House on Mango Street) and Ohio (Winesburg, Ohio.) Not in the city library, not in the university library, not available second-hand anywhere I could find locally. I began to look at alternative books to represent those states, but didn’t want to give up.
In the end, it was the digital download that saved the day. I normally have a book on my phone, for those times when I’m caught out without a nearby bookcase. I prefer the bigger display of the physical book, and the tactile contact with cover and pages, but we’re all used to the alternative (I’m assuming you’re not reading printed out pages at this very moment…)
And so, I bought a copy of Winesburg, Ohio through my reading app, leaving just one more to track down. Cornell University’s library have made available more than 75,000 books through The Internet Archive and here I finally found a copy of House on Mango Street. Fifty books complete.
Now, I just need to finish reading them, and then it’s time to hand out the awards… See you back here soon!
| State | Author | Title |
| Alabama | Harper Lee | To Kill A Mockingbird |
| Alaska | Jon Krakauer | Into the Wild |
| Arizona | Barbara Kingsolver | The Bean Trees |
| Arkansas | Maya Angelou | I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings |
| California | John Steinbeck | East of Eden |
| Colorado | Kent Haruf | Plainsong |
| Connecticut | Richard Yates | Revolutionary Road |
| Delaware | Chuck Palahniuk | Fight Club |
| Florida | Carl Hiaasen | Lucky You |
| Georgia | John Berendt | Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil |
| Hawaii | Kaui Hart Hemmings | The Descendants |
| Idaho | Marilynne Robinson | Housekeeping |
| Illinois | Sandra Cisneros | The House on Mango Street |
| Indiana | Carol Shields | The Stone Diaries |
| Iowa | Bill Bryson | The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid |
| Kansas | Truman Capote | In Cold Blood |
| Kentucky | Toni Morrison | Beloved |
| Louisiana | John Kennedy Toole | A Confederacy of Dunces |
| Maine | Richard Russo | Empire Falls |
| Maryland | Anne Tyler | A Spool of Blue Thread |
| Massachusetts | Arthur Miller | The Crucible |
| Michigan | Jeffrey Eugenides | The Virgin Suicides |
| Minnesota | Garrison Keillor | Lake Wobegon Days |
| Mississippi | William Faulkner | The Sound and the Fury |
| Missouri | Mark Twain | The Adventures of Tom Sawyer |
| Montana | Norman Maclean | A River Runs Through It |
| Nebraska | Willa Cather | My Antonia |
| Nevada | Hunter S Thompson | Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas |
| New Hampshire | John Irving | World According to Garp |
| New Jersey | Junot Diaz | The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao |
| New Mexico | Cormac McCarthy | Cities of the Plain |
| New York | Edith Wharton | The Age of Innocence |
| North Carolina | Charles Frazier | Cold Mountain |
| North Dakota | Louise Erdrich | The Round House |
| Ohio | Sherwood Anderson | Winesburg, Ohio |
| Oklahoma | S E Hinton | The Outsiders |
| Oregon | Ken Kesey | One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest |
| Pennsylvania | Matthew Quick | The Silver Linings Playbook |
| Rhode Island | Henry James | The Ivory Tower |
| South Carolina | Sue Monk Kidd | The Secret Life of Bees |
| South Dakota | Lee Child | 61 Hours |
| Tennessee | Flannery O’Connor | Wise Blood |
| Texas | H G Bissinger | Friday Night Lights |
| Utah | Norman Mailer | The Executioner’s Song |
| Vermont | Donna Tartt | The Secret History |
| Virginia | Patricia Cornwell | Body of Evidence |
| Washington | David Guterson | Snow Falling on Cedars |
| West Virginia | Homer H Hickam jr | Rocket Boys |
| Wisconsin | Chad Harbach | The Art of Fielding |
| Wyoming | Annie Proulx | Close Range: Wyoming Stories |
Brook and the Book 