Your Local Used Book Store
Hm, smell it, that rich, musty odour of antiquity and stockpiled wisdom—you’ve got to love a used book store. Here’s treasure I found at my local venue.
The Metamorphosis
By Franz Kafka
Published in German in 1915 (its original title was Die Verwandlung), this novella justifies Kafka’s status as a great writer, but be prepared, it’s a strange one.
The first sentence sets the stage: “When Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from troubled dreams he found himself transformed in his bed into a monstrous insect.” Now, this might read like the introduction to a dark fantasy or a creature-feature horror, but it’s nothing like that. Aside from Gregor’s original transformation, the rest of the narrative is rooted in gritty reality. Before his metamorphosis, Gregor was the sole provider for his family, and his meager wage was barely enough for them to survive. Following his metamorphosis, they are faced with a multitude of terrible life decisions.
At a literal level, I found The Metamorphosis an engaging read; Kafka presents us with an examination of the human experience that is neither didactic nor overwrought. Loneliness, love, family, ambition, despair, and prejudice are all tightly woven into a memorable story.
If this was all Kafka achieved with The Metamorphosis it would be more than enough. The novella, however, also delivers a deeper level of metaphor and allegory. Elements of the setting, for example, quietly reflect the circumstances of the characters. I especially liked how the title takes on different meanings as the novella progresses. If you don’t notice these things, it doesn’t lessen the story, but if you catch them, Gregor’s experience has an even greater impact.
The bottom line is that The Metamorphosis is a cool story. It successfully merges the fantastic with the realistic—a difficult thing to do, and if you’re a fan of Magical Realism, you should enjoy this.
It only runs around a hundred pages, and can be read in an evening. Crack the cover. It’s definitely worth the time spent, and your local used book store will appreciate the business.
Cool Places
Deadvlei, Namibia
Deadvlei used to be a shallow pool fed by the Tsauchab river. When the river flooded, the Camel Thorn Trees that grew there thrived. After a change in the climate, however, drought hit the area, and sand dunes cut Deadvlei off from the river. The trees died, and what was left was a white pan of dry, crusty clay. Because the air is so brutally dry, the dying trees did not decompose and are left as a testament to the desert. They’re estimated to be close to 900 years old.
It’s a very cool area that we got to by driving down an expansive, wind-scored, desert valley, which is about as inhospitable as any place on earth can be. On both sides of the valley, mountains of rust coloured sand rise up in magnificently sculpted dunes. The best time to go is early in the morning when the knife-edge crests of the dunes create a stunning contrast of light and shadow. Deadvlei itself is a short hike across low dunes, and the Big Daddy Dune that towers beside it makes an impressive backdrop
Your Local Used Book Store
Hm, smell it, there’s that rich, musty odour of antiquity and stockpiled wisdom. A used book store is a historical artifact. It’s printed hieroglyphics have captured thoughts long since mute on a writer’s tongue. I thrill at row upon row of encapsulated humanity curated by thousands of readers over time and judged worthy of being placed back on a shelf for others to read. Some had been best sellers; some had been banned, some had quietly built a readership over decades.
Holding a book gives you a tactile connection to all the people who read that book before you. Their hands touched those pages. Their breath rolled over those words. I often wonder if I breathe deeply enough, will I inhale some of the moisture they left behind—touch their essence somehow? I love to find a finger smudge or someone’s notes written into the margins of a well-worn book. These things really make a book come alive.
Here’s one review of a treasure I found at my local used book store.
Slaughterhouse-Five or The Children’s Crusade, A Duty-dance with Death
by Kurt Vonnegut
Buckle in for a crazy ride—Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse Five is guaranteed to be one of the strangest novels you’ll ever read. Now, don’t get the impression this means the narrative is inaccessible, it isn’t; Vonnegut’s style is immediately captivating. From the very first page, you’ll be pulled in, and you’ll stay wrapped in those pages until the story ends.
The cover identifies the book as “a novel,” meaning that it’s fiction, which most of it is, but as Vonnegut tells us in the first paragraph, “All this happened, more or less.” Vonnegut was in Slaughterhouse-Fire during the firebombing of Dresden in 1945; that’s a fact, and this experience in the foundation upon which the novel rests. It is important to remember this as the main character, Billy Pilgrim, ping-pongs through a seemingly disjointed narrative where he travels through time and meets a race of aliens. (Some call this a science fiction story, but that label does not do it justice.) It’s an engaging, often very funny story, with passages you’ll want to write down so you can return to them later. As hilarious and light-hearted as the novel can be, the terrific slaughter that took place in Dresden always hovers in the background.
I’ve never read a novel that had such a powerful, poignant, and unexpected ending. It will turn everything upside down, its impact will stay with you for a long, long time.
Cool Places
Black Rhino Reserve, Damaraland, Namibia
The tracker climbs in beside me on the safari vehicle and rests the stock of his rifle on the floorboard. He’s young. Too young, I think, to be carrying such a firearm. As I stare at the business end of the rifle, our guide—Loud—comments that if we see poachers, “then something needs to be done.” In other African countries we’ve travelled to, we’ve heard rumours that poachers are shot on sight. I assume that’s what Loud means, and I’m a little shocked at the revelation. I came to this reserve in Damaraland to see a Black Rhino. It never occurred to me that I might be in a firefight.
We are driving through a truly inhospitable landscape. There is no water, and the ground is covered with rust-coloured stones that vary in size from cantaloupes to watermelons. They make the drive a bone-shaking torment, and trekking on foot would be disastrous. The parched hills are sprinkled green with a single type of bush, and Loud informs us that not only is its milky sap deadly, but the smoke from its burning branches is also fatal. The Black Rhinoceros, however, thrives on it, so it’s a perfect habitat for the solitary beast we’ve travelled so far to see.
We have just entered a small valley, when one of the trackers calls out, and Loud stops our vehicle. I look down to the ground beside us and see where a patch of open sand has been flattened into a large, round print. It’s going in the opposite direction of us, but a rhino has recently passed this way.
Loud turns our vehicle around—much easier said than done in such a rocky landscape. The trackers now walk on the road beside us, alternately surveying the surrounding hills and then studying the ground. In a very short time, one of them calls out and points ahead. It’s a long ways away, but on the large, sloping hillside before us, we can make out the unmistakable profile of a rhinoceros. It’s reddish-grey, probably due to light reflected from the surrounding rocks, and it blends into the hillside, but there’s no question that we looking at one of the few of these magnificent beasts still left in existence.
We drive a litter farther, then Loud parks the vehicle and informs us that we are going to travel the rest of the distance on foot. On the surface, this sounds somewhat suicidal; Black Rhinos are notoriously aggressive, and their charges are often fatal. They also have highly developed auditory and olfactory senses. We have been assured, however, that they have poor eyesight, so if we approach them downwind, keeping a safe distance between us, we will be safe.
We leave the vehicle and move in single file, inching closer and closer toward the rhino. No one talks above a whisper. At first, my gaze swings between our transportation and the animal on the hillside. The rocks make it difficult to walk, and I’m struck by the thought that if we have to flee a charge, we won’t be able to run, and not all of us will make it back to the vehicle in time.
Once I reconcile myself to our situation, I focus all my attention on the rhino. It might not be able to smell or see us, but we have made enough noise that it turns to stare in our direction. The air becomes suddenly charged. It knows something is out here. The question is: How curious will it become? Will it decide to move closer? Close enough to see us? My breathing quickens, and my heart thumps in my chest.
I look at Loud and the trackers, hoping for some assurance, and they all seem calm. Time stretches, and the rhino appears to lose interest and begins to wander the hillside. I tell myself it’s okay to calm down. Calm down? The animal I’m looking at grows to a weight of 2900 pounds, and it’s almost five feet at the shoulder. Standing out on that forbidding terrain, with such a monstrous creature close by, who could possibly calm down?
I get out my camera and begin to document the encounter. I miss the days of film when I could only spare to take one or two photos and then be pleasantly surprised when I developed the film. With digital, I’ll take fifty pictures and then get bored when I have to sort through them all. Still, it’s the experience that matters the most, so after capturing the rhino in my lens, I let the camera hang at my side and try to capture it in my memory.
With the Black Rhino, holding it in my memory strikes me as a terrible necessity. Will such animals still be around if I want to come back in the future? Black Rhinos are critically endangered, and it is estimated that only 6,500 of them remain on this planet Earth. That seems like a large number, but it’s spread over the entire continent of Africa. Will this be a success story or just another tragic tale of extinction? Their numbers are increasing, so the future looks hopeful. Apart from loss of habitat, the most serious threat they face is poaching. I think again: Should poachers be shot on sight? Balanced against the survival of a species, I have to admit that I wouldn’t argue against it.
Loud waits a long time before signalling that we should return to the safari vehicle. I turn to leave, but then steal one last moment to simply stand and stare, trying to absorb it all. With the sweeping landscape, the elementary colours, and that strange creature in its skin of armour, it is all too much to take in. I take a deep breath and decide that I need to be satisfied for the moment; this is one of those encounters where it’s impossible to get enough. It’s better to touch it lightly and move on. More adventure awaits.
Your Local Used Book Store
Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury
Get a mug of hot chocolate and settle in by the fire for this dystopian classic.
First off, is it worth the read? Definitely—what a great book. I have to admit that I love this story.
For all of its complex issues, Fahrenheit 451 is an easy read. Although, if you wish, you can slow it down and dwell on its social relevance, for Bradbury was prescient in foreseeing what Western culture was to become—and now is. There’s a lot of discussion regarding Orwell’s 1984, a classic to be sure; however, Bradbury’s predictions more accurately describe the root causes of our society’s cultural demise.
Anyway, back to the novel. From the very first page I was captivated, and the story only intensifies after that. The protagonist, Montag, is caught in a life and death struggle with his conscience. He’s an engaging character and captured my sympathy—I cared how his story would end, and that alone was enough to keep me riveted to the page. The other characters in the story are all well-developed and believable. Perhaps the most interesting character is the fire chief Beatty. There are layers of complexity to him that are fascinating.
Bradbury’s use of language is magnificent. I would number the first paragraph of Fahrenheit 451 as one of the most compelling ever written, and he maintains this level of linguistic artistry throughout the entire novel.
“It was a special pleasure to see things eaten, to see thing blackened and changed. With the brass nozzle in his fists, with this great python spitting its venomous kerosene upon the world, the blood pounding in his head, and his hands were the hands of some amazing conductor playing all the symphonies of blazing and burning to bring down the tatters and charcoal ruins of history.”
Wow, strong stuff.
My only criticism is that I felt the story lost its focus a little near the conclusion. It’s a minor problem and not important enough to change my glowing recommendation of this story.
Cool Places
Actum Tunichil Mukal—Cave of the Stone Sepulcher, Belize
This is one of the coolest places my wife and I have ever gone to. It’s a cave in the Tapir Mountain Nature Reserve of Belize, and you can only go there with a guide. It’s located about an hour’s drive from San Ignacio, and once you reach the edge of the reserve, it’s another hour on foot into the jungle.
To get to the cave, we had to swim across a small river that flowed from its entrance. Once inside, the only light we had came from our headlamps. Sometimes we scrambled over slippery rock. Sometimes we were forced into the river, neck deep in freezing water, and had to cling to the cave wall, pulling ourselves deeper and deeper into the mountain.
In time, we came to a waterfall and climbed up its cascading face to slip through a rock opening at its top. Past that, there were passages where we needed to crawl, but these opened up to spacious caverns where our torches barely illuminated the distant walls and ceiling. Stalactites, stalagmites, columns, and pillow rocks hung everywhere. Pale under our weak headlamps, these formations erupted into colour when our guide shone his powerful torch on them.
We scrambled and hiked for another hour until we reached a place where we had to crawl up a large boulder and onto an overhanging ledge. Once back on level ground, we were told to remove our shoes—the rest of the way was to be done in stocking feet. This dry chamber, as it was called, once had ceremonial significance to the Maya and was littered with ceramic pots that had rested there for a thousand years of darkness.
The cave is called a sepulcher for a reason—it contains human remains. Archeologists have identified these remains as sacrificial in nature. Similar to the pottery, most are calcium encrusted. In total, we saw five individuals, ranging from fourteen to thirty-nine years old. The final victim we visited was the Crystal Maiden.
We reached her place of internment after forty minutes of walking through the dry chambers. It was a surreal, magnificent, and macabre experience. Against the far wall of the last chamber we entered, we ascended an aluminum ladder that reached up to the small cave. The Crystal Maiden rested on the floor of this cave, only five feet from where we stood. Limbs stretched wide, she faced in our direction. A short distance from her there was another skeleton, this one of a child.
We were told that she was an eighteen year old girl who had been brutally beaten (two of her vertebrae were crushed), then tossed to the back of the cave and left to die. The smaller victim may have been her child. Was this a sacrifice or a murder? It is a question that will never be answered. All we can be certain of is that she died in fear and pain.
Her skeleton has lain so long in the Stone Sepulcher that the bones have become encased in calcium, as though covered in hoar frost of crystal, and she sparkles in the torchlight. It is both beautiful and tragic.
A short time passed, and we took our leave, descending the ladder in silence. It was over an hour away, but the sunlight awaited us. It was not so for the Crystal Maiden. As our torchlight faded, the sound of our exit passed in a fading echo, and she was once more left to the darkness.
