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There is a narrow path from the door of my office to my desk. If it gets any narrower, I'll be in trouble with the fire marshal. Stacks rise on all sides, leading to the shelves on the wall—most of them lined two rows deep. More stacks and crammed shelves surround me at my desk.
I was still in college when a friend first suggested that I was likely to meet my death in an avalanche of books. I prefer a more benign image, which will be readily available to those who (like me) encountered Donald Duck comics at some point in their education. Think of Uncle Scrooge McDuck swimming in his money bin; then imagine books instead of wads of cash.
Not that the books come without any obligations attached. Even after doing this for years, I feel responsible for all the worthy books we don't manage to cover. (Another shipment from the mailroom arrived even as I was typing these words.) What books should we review? How best to treat them?
Those three massive books on Jesus—should they be assigned to a single, superhuman reviewer? Where should I look for writers who might contribute to a section on all things Armenian? (Would it make sense to include a piece on the artist Arshile Gorky in that section, or would that be merely a reflex of identity politics?) Angus Trumble's A Brief History of the Smile (Basic Books) is a tiresomely chatty book which—like so many books today—betrays anxiety, desperation even, at the prospect of losing the reader's attention, but can we ignore a book with such a winsome subject? (How did the vogue for this genre get started, anyway—histories of the mirror, of salt, of the color blue? Is there someone who could reliably tell that story and what it suggests?) And when am I finally going to find the perfect reviewer for Maxime Schwartz's How the Cows Turned Mad (Univ. of California Press)?
Many of the books are sorted by subject (three books, for instance, on the history and process of naming a new pope, ready to be assigned at a moment's notice), but a stack of recent arrivals might contain almost anything. Near the top of a high-priority pile are galleys of Edwidge Danticat's new novel, The Dew Breaker (Knopf), about a man who was a torturer in Haiti and who now lives in Brooklyn. (Should we review it by itself or with another novel?) Lower in the same stack is Quentin Schultze's Christianity and the Mass Media in America (Michigan State), and lower still, Ronald Hutton's Witches, Druids and King Arthur (Hambledon & London), which we'll review in the summer alongside the big-budget movie, King Arthur. Sometimes accidental juxtapositions are telling: Commandante Che (Penn State) rests atop Political Visions and Illusions (InterVarsity).
I see in my mind's eye a splendid piece on Gothic art and architecture. Can we afford the space for it, among all the other topics competing for coverage? A new arrival from Princeton—Isabel Hofmeyr's The Portable Bunyan: A Transnational History of "The Pilgrim's Progress"—clearly must be covered. I'll call Mark Noll and pick his brain about possible reviewers.
Speaking of reviewers, I have to send the book on Beethoven's Ninth that just arrived from Yale to John Paul Ito, who is doing a long-gestating essay-review on the composer. And, the eminently qualified first reviewer having withdrawn because of other commitments, I need to find another one for David Chappell's important new book, A Stone of Hope: Prophetic Religion and the Death of Jim Crow (Univ. of North Carolina Press). We'll be late on that now, blast it—but then, the wheels often turn slowly at Books & Culture. (Was it Jon Pott of Eerdmans who thanked me for one review and then allowed that yes, it would have been nice to have seen it appear while the book was still in print?)
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