A copy of a book
Owen Jones is well known for being…what to call it…officious is perhaps the best word. For poking into stuff that’s not really his concern, for seeking out people to prod and scold and censure, for being tooth-grindingly self-righteous and smug. He is of course a devoted Trans Ally and policer of women who don’t think Gender Indenniny is the most important cause of all time.
His latest exercise in policing other people is a WHAT IS THAT ON HIS BOOKSHELF.
Never mind that, why does he have a copy of Atlas Shrugged? Why a book about cold cream? Why the Oxford Dictionary of Scottish History? So many mysteries, so little time.
But seriously. We have books for a lot of reasons. It’s not necessarily a matter of love, much less of endorsement. We can have some books for purposes of research or curiosity. Politicians probably have an unusually wide range of reasons for hanging on to particular books. But more than that it’s just so…peering, prying, snooping, sniffing, sneering. It’s so intrusive. I’m enjoying seeing people’s bookshelves as they do broadcasts from home; I wish Chris Cuomo had a bookshelf behind him in his basement instead of those two dull white armchairs. I look to see what books they have out of curiosity but I hope it wouldn’t occur to me to ask the world why Don Lemon or Jake Tapper or Rachel Maddow has THAT book.
Andy Lewis shared his. I have some of those too.
Who knew Cotton Mather would be a role model in 2020?
I’m an atheist. I still own a Bible (KJV). So does that mean I am not an atheist?
I’m a worker’s rights sort of Liberal, but I read anti worker web sites. Does that make me anti-worker?
I support women’s rights, especially reproductive health rights, but I still watch porn. I guess that just makes me a dirty old man. :-)
I also know twitter isn’t literature, but FFS, if want to criticise people’s reading choices, learn when to use do/doesn’t correctly.
Ugh, Jones is rancid. Everything is performance to him, down to what books people have on their shelves. Or rather, what books people display on their shelves.
I can picturing him spending hours arranging his books before every video conference. I can picture him buying books solely to place on his shelf because of the impression he thinks they’ll have. I can picture him carefully stressing books to make them look well-thumbed. None of this strains my imagination in the slightest.
What he’s really saying is “why have Michael Gove and his wife allowed people to see…” because he assumes everyone else is 100% performance too.
Seriously, the fella’s writing about Michael Gove and still manages to come across as the more slimy, self-important, unspeakable one. That takes some doing.
I don’t know, if I went to visit someone and saw David Irving and The Bell Curve on their shelves I don’t think I’d accept a second invitation. (Having said that…I have, or possibly had at this point, Margaret Thatcher’s autobiography on my shelves–my dad somehow came by a signed copy (think he met her once) and I somehow ended up with it.)
Two more totally random thoughts re bookshelves: first, I’ve just started following @BCredibility; second, I’m rewatching one of my favourite TV series, Being Erica, and she’s just dumped a guy because he had a copy of An Idiot’s Guide to Dostoyevsky on his bookshelf.
guest:
My book – well, I say “shelf”, it’s more a labyrinth of shelf-adjacent piles – contains many of the same books as Andy Lewis’ but it also contains books by quacks, religious apologists and other horrors. These I either bought second hand for research purposes (and with the added benefit of removing copies from circulation) or had given by friends who a) knew I was interested in that kind of thing and/or b) really wanted to wind me up.
Also, at my age, you start to inherit books in increasing amounts and onto the ‘shelf’ they go. Few of them are books I’d consider buying or even reading because if I did, I’d probably already have them.
I’m actually in the process of boxing up a lot of my books to donate to charity shops but I can’t bear to inflict some of them on the public. So when I’m done, the awful books might be a significant minority!
I remember during the run of Fred Clark’s essays on ‘Left Behind’ commenters were agonsing over whether they should give away their copies to charity shops, as doing so might lead to other people reading them.
I have at least one book by an AGW denialist. Does that mean I am one of them?
When I survey my rather vast book collection (which includes many from my mother’s and my grandfather’s collections willed down to me) I can honestly say that there is not one from which I haven’t learned something. It may not be a conclusion or viewpoint that the author the author hoped to persuade me to, but I can’t help that.
Like you, Omar, I have some denier books. There are some rather wealthy foundations (Heritage, for one) that have sent copies of books their members published to me for free; I got the impression they were sending them to everyone in the country who teaches Environmental Science. And like latsot, they remain in my vast collection (like his, a labyrinth more than shelves; the shelves are full, but the books continue to be added), I don’t want to put them out there for the general public.
guest, I can get that, but I think for me it would depend on whatever else was on their shelves, since I believe a well educated person should read things they don’t agree with at least part of the time. If those books were the only ones like it in a vast collection of volumes of things that aren’t obnoxious, I might give them a chance.
Oooh Being Erica (guest @ 5) – that was an interesting show.
Objecting to the *possession* of a *book* is abhorrent.
This is one step away from thought crime.
Another fan :) I recently mentioned it in a group I was participating in, and another person said she loved it too, which really pleased me. I don’t think I’ve ever re-watched a TV series (life’s too short), but this one is really holding up to a second viewing. I find it completely charming, and it continues to be thought-provoking. I also find it a great introspection tool (maybe I can’t have Doctor Tom (who looks unsettlingly like my PhD advisor) as a therapist, but I can take some of the ideas to heart).
One of the commenters on Jones’ thread asked, “Where is the shelf with The Turner Diaries?” I used to own a copy of The Turner Diaries, and read it through because I wanted to understand, as best I could, the mindset held by a segment of the American population, including terrorists like McVeigh (and I admit to a curiosity about extreme viewpoints and behaviors). The book is absolutely vile, of course, and I got rid of it years ago, but if Gove had a copy I would not necessarily attribute the views espoused therein to him. Of course, Gove is already pretty vile, we don’t have to look at his bookshelf to understand that.
Gove, as Education Secretary, was quite big on teaching about the holocaust, so I would say the David Irving book says nothing about him except his intellectual curiosity. He is one of the more intellectual of our senior ministers.
I have been put off people by their books – eg Jonathan Livingstone Seagull was a huge turn off for me, or anything in the Woo Genre. If I saw books about fascism (I’ve got a couple including Mein Kampf) I would assume intellectual curiosity, not that the owner is a fascist. However a lot of books by Marx, Lenin etc I would assume that reflected their actual political beliefs. But that probably points to the kind of people I am likely to meet.
I do remember not going to an airbnb as the owner said she was a big Ayn Rand fan – and I haven’t actually read any Ayn Rand.
Books are markers to some degree – but need a lot more context then a Jones shuddering and pearl-clutching at Gove’s shelf loads.
@latsot – yes, it is all such a performance. He’s a modern day Joseph Surface.
I read a David Irving book when I was a teenager. I also read Goebbels’ diary. I was studying Nazi Germany and wanted to understand how it happened. The thing that stayed with me about Goebbels was how serenely sure he was that he was in the right, and a good person. It really stuck with me, that the most dangerous thing you can do is throw out doubt. I wonder if Jones has ever read it.
I was writing a similar thought about Trump’s habit of thinking as you were writing this. the most dangerous thing you can do is throw out doubt. Exactly.
I guess a fair(ish) argument-from-bookshelf could be that we may have Nazi or racist or AynRandian books for research purposes but we probably tuck them into bottom corners as opposed to placing them in the easily-seen middle.
But, nah, that’s not really an argument, just an observation. We like some of our books more than others and probably shelve them accordingly. We don’t consult Owen Jones first.
I suppose for some people, they would stick them in that way. My thing is that I alphabetize my books by author, and if an awful author shows up front and center, that could make it look like I favor them…sigh. I can’t give up alphabetizing. My OCD won’t let me. It’s one OCD trait my therapist and I never worked on because it seems benign and doesn’t actually impair my ability to function. In some jobs, it enhances it.
Now, though, our bookshelves are too full to hold more volumes, so we are putting some in storage. Guess which go out to storage first? Those that are by authors I find repulsive.
Sheena:
*chef’s kiss*
I used to own – and may still somewhere – a Spanish/English dictionary. Does that mean I know Spanish?
This reminds me of Cold War-era knowledge-demonizing. E.g., “Why do you want to learn Russian?”
Or from early post-911. E.g., “Why do you want to study Arabic?”
Refreshing my memory on this
A long long time ago, I read Marx and promptly decided I wasn’t a Marxist and forgot most of it and went on with my life. Cut to the past 5 years, when I saw jenda-feels kiddies with the hammer and sickle emoji in their screen-names claiming to be Marxists. Even with what little I truly remember from my old reading, I cannot see how anybody thought Marxism and mystical gender-souls make-believe would be a match. Just saying.
And I have owned/read more than one version of the Bible and Mein Kampf over the years – guess poor Owen would not be able to deal with that.