Long ago, The Onion ran the mock-headline: “Book Given As Gift Actually Read.” More recently, the Tumblr site The Books They Gave Me has collected autobiographical reminiscences that illustrate the sometimes perilous task of finding the right book for the right reader. But what about book-giving as a theme in literature itself? The Times ran a feature last month itemizing the books “authors love to give and receive,” but the examples below suggest that some writers have taken a dim view of book-giving in their own work:
In Martin Amis’s novel “Money,” Martina Twain gives “Animal Farm” to John Self, the book’s hyper-verbal, bombed-out narrator, in hopes that literature might begin to refine him. Self has trouble getting past the first page but eventually gathers enough momentum to down nine pages on a transatlantic flight. This is not enough for Martina, who says, “You just call me when you’ve read that book.” Self is motivated, but stymied: “Reading takes a long time, though, don’t you find?” he asks the reader. “It takes such a long time to get from, say, page twenty-one to page thirty. I mean, first you’ve got page twenty-three, then page twenty-five, then page twenty-seven, then page twenty-nine, not to mention the even numbers.”
Once he does get further in, he has trouble grasping the novel’s allegorical nature, and this leads to exasperation: “I mean, how come the pigs were meant to be so smart, so civilized and urbane? Have you ever seen pigs doing their stuff? . . . To eat your girlfriend’s tail when she isn’t looking – that counts as good behavior, that counts as old-world courtesy, by the standards of the sty. . . . I tell you, it’s no accident that they’re called pigs. And yet Orwell here figures them for the brains behind the farm. He just can’t have seen any pigs in action. Either that, or I’m missing something.”
In “Redburn,” Herman Melville’s travelogue novel from 1849, the narrator, an aspiring young sailor, is also disappointed in a book given to him for self-improvement, by Mr. Jones, a family friend: “When he gave it to me, he said, that although I was going to sea, I must not forget the importance of a good education; and that there was hardly any situation in life, however humble and depressed, or dark and gloomy, but one might find leisure in it to store his mind, and build himself up in the exact sciences.” He is warned that the book – Adam Smith’s “The Wealth of Nations” – might prove dull at first, but that dedicated reading would yield “hidden charms and unforeseen attractions,” and maybe even “the true way to retrieve the poverty of my family, and again make them all well-to-do in the world.”
Finding the book “dry as crackers and cheese,” he gives up: “I wondered whether Mr. Jones had ever read the volume himself; and could not help remembering, that he had to get on a chair when he reached it down from its dusty shelf; that certainly looked suspicious.”
Melville himself would not have been likely to recommend “Redburn” as a gift. In “Melville: His World and Work,” Andrew Delbanco tells us that the author reacted to positive reviews of the novel by writing in his journal: “I, the author, know [it] to be trash, & wrote it to buy some tobacco with.”
If you can think of other examples of books given as presents in literature, please offer them as gifts below.