I Heart Free Books
I like the urban tradition of leaving books on the curb for strangers to carry off. To one like me who has built his library from cast-offs, secondhand stores, and less honorable means, there are few better surprises than finding abandoned stacks and a sign that reads, “Free Books.”
That’s just what I found this morning on Calvert Street NW. The collection was mostly political history and biography with a socialist bent, and bits of literature mixed in. I snatched most of the latter: Dostoevsky, Kundera, Woolf, Nietzsche, Plato, Solzhenitsyn, Nick Hornby.
Try to call me selfish; I call myself struggling. At $7.50 an hour, I can’t pay full price at Kramerbooks, Olsson’s, or even most of the secondhand stores, which usually overvalue their stock (Letters To a Young Poet was $6 for one battered edition. That’s an 80-page book.). And given that whoever owned this collection was strong on worker’s rights, I assume that person will not mind my taking my fill. The books may still be out there. They’re on the north side of Calvert just east of the Ellington Bridge.
March 28th, 2007 at 12:57 pm
“Dostoevsky, Kundera, Woolf, Nietzsche, Plato, Solzhenitsyn, Nick Hornby”
This reminds me those scenes in “Star Trek” episodes where a character rattles off a list of geniuses, topped off by a made-up guy. (”Beethoven! Mozart! Brumblemeyer!” “Shakespeare! Faulkner! Spaetzlehoeuwer!”) Hornby isn’t made up, but he’s not exactly in the same league as those others.
March 28th, 2007 at 1:39 pm
I’m waiting for a Trekkie to pipe in with this kind of response:
“I have written well-research biographies for every fictional genius ever mentioned on ‘Star Trek.’ Your references to David Brumblemeyer and Ardath Spaetzlehoeuwer are equally as incongruous as the inclusion of Hornby on that list of authors. Everybody knows that Brumblemeyer was not a musical composer — he was a meta-quantum theorist (although he did dabble in quasitonal cosmology). And Spaetzlehoeuwer was not an author — he helped to develop the rare-earth psychotropic lenses that were used in early whole
-room holography projections.”
March 28th, 2007 at 10:02 pm
maybe relevant — more free books for trade (it’s a points system) in DC and elsewhere: http://www.bookmooch.com
March 29th, 2007 at 1:28 pm
You will notel, Mark, that I used Nick Hornby’s first and last name, while I referred to the others by last name only. Some of them are great; Hornby is trendy. (Also, I picked him up for a friend. I’m not gonna read “About a Boy.”)
March 29th, 2007 at 8:23 pm
I find it interesting that Mark snarks on Nick Hornby books while he has only recently bemoaned the inability of Jonathan Lethem to translate a love of rock and roll into decent literature (http://www.washingtoncitypaper.com/blogs/citydesk/index.php/2007/03/02/kill-the-rock-novel-please/), a form Hornby has mastered. While high literature inspired by and evocative of rock music can be brilliant (see Joyce Carol Oates’s “Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?” and T.C. Boyle “Greasy Lake,” for starters), high literature about rock musicians and their fans tends to suck (see the aforementioned Lethem book as well Rick Moody’s own bad rock novel Garden State, no relation to the bad rock movie of the same name). Hornby actually succeeds because he sees the limits of writing about rock music, basically post-teenage angst and wishy-washy nostalgia. You snobs should pick up About a Boy next time you have had a bit too much to drink and aren’t feeling up to the usual Pynchon or Plato. It’s the best literary reaction to Kurt Cobain’s death that I’ve ever read—not that it has much competition. On a related note, Lethem’s recent story in the New Yorker (http://www.newyorker.com/fiction/features/2007/03/19/070319fi_fiction_lethem_, which concerns film nerds on the Upper East side as opposed to rock nerds in L.A., is fantastic.
April 6th, 2007 at 4:56 pm
[...] don’t have much money, and I don’t know how to cook. But during the month that I slept on friends’ couches in [...]
April 11th, 2007 at 3:36 pm
i also heard about some free book exchange thing in baltimore. my friend told me about it. i think it happens on weekends…bring a book, take a book. don’t remember what it is called…anyone know?
June 27th, 2007 at 4:36 pm
[...] Free books! Right this minute on Calvert Street! Get there before Jonathan York gets there first! [...]
August 5th, 2007 at 11:10 am
About A Boy - new movie on http://www.dvdipodmovies.com
August 24th, 2007 at 3:01 pm
[...] and some books. And probably some other miscellaneous things. (Hey, who doesn’t like free stuff?) I appreciate the generosity, but I’m not sure how I can use unattached desk drawers [...]
November 30th, 2007 at 7:06 pm
[...] I like books as much as anyone else, and I love [...]