Close the screens, leave home, enjoy an adventure
Hit up a library or bricks-and-mortar mom-and-pop shop for a richer, more expansive experience.
Ordering some item from a company like Amazon — a smock, a special coffee, cotton swabs, whatever — is quick, simple and easy. You place the order, and two or three days later, the package appears on your front porch. The same ease and speed apply when ordering your groceries from Walmart or the local food mart. You make a list, tap a key, arrive at the delivery time, put the groceries in the car and brush your hands off as a job well done.
These online shopping excursions save both time and money and can be done from the comfort of your living room. What’s not to like?
Well, for one thing, there’s adventure. Approach that excursion with the attitude of an anthropologist, and with your eyes and heart unprejudiced by familiarity, and you can make that excursion to the shopping mall or to Main Street as picturesque and romantic as a trip to Spain, minus the hassle and the expense. You encounter real people rather than a screen, and you’ll bump into all sorts of things in a store you’d have missed by shopping online for one specific object.
If you swing by the grocery store, for instance, and you enter with the mind set of an ethnographer setting out on a field study, you’ll find you’ve traveled to a grand emporium of food, drink and dry goods never imagined until quite recently, even by the greatest kings and potentates of the globe. You arrived intending to buy sugar and condensed milk to make snow cream, and you leave with those goods plus cherries from Chile, shrimp from Vietnam, a bottle of French wine, a birthday card for your seven-year-old nephew and a pack of Post-It notes that you’ve been meaning to pick up for two months.
In addition, you’ve helped out an elderly woman by reaching to a top shelf and snagging a box of Cheerios for her, you’ve sent a smile to a mom supervising three kids while pushing a cart stuffed with necessities and you’ve dealt with a surly cashier at the check-out counter by being as polite as possible. By dint of stepping into that store, you’ve become a warrior in the battle against the increasing isolation that marks our age.
The same dynamic marks your visit to a library or a bookstore. A friend raves about a newly published novel, you order it online, and, Presto! You’ve got the book in hand three days later. But visit a library or a shop crammed with paper and print, and you’ve opened yourself to random escapades you would have never encountered on your laptop.
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Recently, for instance, I entered the library looking for Herman Wouk’s “War and Remembrance,” the sequel to “The Winds of War,” which I’d reviewed for the paper. The book was checked out, but as always, I spent a bit of time browsing the “New Arrivals” shelf. Here I found Luke Rosiak’s “Race to the Bottom” about problems with our schools and Louis Masur’s “A Journey North: Jefferson, Madison, & the Forging of a Friendship.” While I may not read Rosiak, Masur’s history of a 1791 trip to New England taken by Jefferson and Madison was a real find, useful for some other writing I do.
The second-hand bookshop across the street from where I now live is positively brimming with such possibilities and surprises. Here I did locate “War and Remembrance” and bought this 1000-page plus mega-novel for a song compared to what I’d have paid online. But the real gold I dug up that day was a compendium of articles from 40 years ago, “A Sense of History: The Best Writing from the Pages of American Heritage.” My dad had subscribed to American Heritage magazine back in the 1950s and ‘60s — this “magazine” actually came in hardcover — and I’d loved reading these volumes, so this find was a sentimental treasure. Moreover, like Masur’s story, “A Sense of History” contained several excellent pieces from which I could draw ideas for the historical and biographical articles I write.
Throughout my years of writing reviews for the SMN, a trip to the library or a bookshop has brought to my attention a vast multitude of books I’d never dreamed of reading, much less ordering online. Dolly and Rachel Parton’s “Good Lookin’ Cookin’” would never have appeared on my radar. Gretchen Rubin’s best-selling “The Happiness Project” would have passed me right by if it hadn’t snagged my attention in the library. Ditto for John Kralik’s “A Simple Act of Gratitude.” Children’s books, histories of art and literature, suspense novels, books on travel and religious faith and therapy: the list goes on and on, and the headwaters of this stream never go dry.
Emily Dickinson wrote the poem that many remember from their school days, which begins: “There is no Frigate like a Book/To take us Lands away.” Shut down those screens, go to a bookshop, go to your local library, and you’ll find an entire fleet of books to take you lands and lands away.
(Jeff Minick reviews books and has written four of his own: two novels, “Amanda Bell” and “Dust On Their Wings,” and two works of nonfiction, “Learning As I Go” and “Movies Make the Man.” This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..)
