I recently went to the San Francisco Public Library Book Fair. In an aircraft hangar of a warehouse, billions and billions of used books were arranged over miles and miles of old folding tables. Readers from all over the bay area (and some beyond I might imagine) pored over the dessicated remains of someone else’s poor reading habits. Some even pushed trolley carts to carry all of their booty.
Over the years I’ve gotten picky with my reading and I prefer to buy wanted books instead of reading what lays at hand. But still after an afternoon of triage at the book fair, I found some out-of-print gems.
The first was a ratty old Dover book complete with a sickly green cover titled “Aquatic Mammals: Their Adaptations to Life in the Water” by a former president of the Society of Mammals, A. Brazier Howell. It’s a pleasant surprise to read a book by a scientist who has clearly studied his material over a lifetime of idosyncratic cogitation. So many aspects are considered in this book, from swimming mechanics, to breathing changes. The writing is clean and soberly unlike today’s flimsy attention-grabbing scientific chaff that cry out with breathless titles such as “Secret Life of This” and “Secret Life of That”. This is a straight up biology book, albeit softened a bit for the lay reader.
But I share in the author’s delight over aquatic mammals. My favorite part of zoos is still the sea mammal sections. If you have ever watched a walrus swim right up to the pyrex glass and reverse with a slap of the tail onto the glass, you will know the heft and majesty of aquatic mammal life. I must admit, one of the reasons I am reading this is in light of the Aquatic Ape theory of the origin of humans from the monkey line.
The second is a collection of short stories by one of China’s foremost women writers, Zhang Jie in a collection titled “Love Must Not Be Forgotten”. These are strange stories, telling of thwarted loves and ruined lives. It charts how the irrepressible tides of love course even under the bureacratic juggernaut of communist China. These are frigid stories illuminated with little shards of emotion, and for me, an alienable yet recognizable landscape.
