Books Free

My Kindle is just one part of my Invisible Library. I belong to service called Book Lender, formerly known as Books Free. “Invisible” not because it is digital but I borrow them for a $95 per year fee. This is to say the books aren’t free -- the $95 covers shipping costs but my shipping costs for two books a month is around $45. Still not bad: 24 books for $50 or approximately $2 per book.  If I read popular novelists and genres, I might have a queue as long as my Netflix one: over 200. Alas, I only have 20. When I started the service in November 2005, I had 40 to 50 books in the queue. But it was always a stretch, even more so now, to find something I want to read.

The books, paperbacks, fit into a middle range of my reading interests. First, I found as many authors I liked and ordered their books. The first two borrowed were written by Julian Barnes, a book of stories called The Lemon Table, and by Kobo Abe, a novel, Secret Rendezvous. I have read most of Barnes’ work, including Flaubert’s Parrot, History of the World in 10 and1/2 Chapters, and Arthur and George. Other Barnes books I got from Books Free were The Sense of an Ending, which I read in a day, Levels of Life (novel), and Nothing to be Frightened of (memoir). 

Kobo Abe is best known for Woman in the Dunes, but my favorite works of his are The Box Man and Kangaroo Notebook. . I have found one other Abe book, The Ruined Map, and I have read several books by Haruki Murakami, one of Japan’s greatest literary writers: Spunik Sweetheart (novel), After the Quake (stories), and The Elephant Vanishes (stories).

Another book by Murakami, After Dark, I never read. As I surveyed the 87 books I have rented, there were more than a few like After Dark. Unlike the unread books in my personal library, these I will not try again to read or finish. Other partially read or unread books were:\

1)      Two novels in one volume by Kathy Acker – I didn’t get into these. Couldn’t generate interest in the prose or the characters. She’s not an easy read even if one likes her work.

2)      Goodnight, Nobody (short stories) by Michael Knight – I remember nothing about it. Don’t know if I started it, read a few stories, or what. I had the book out for two months.

3)      Lunar Follies by Gilbert Sorrentino – this is an author I have struggled to read despite wanting to read his work. His magnum opus, Mulligan Stew, is one of the big unread novels in my library that I may try one last time to get through.

4)      Then a several in a row: Going Down by David Markson; The Old Child and Other Stories by Jennie Erpenbeck; Mermaids on the Golf Course (stories)by Patricia Highsmith; and Van Gogh’s Bad Café: A Love Story by Frederic Tuten.

You may or may not know these authors. It was my first time for several of them. But after not getting around to four books in a row, I dropped out of Books free in November 2008 after three years and didn’t reconnect until 2015.

I received two books before I could change my queue, one by Gilbert Sorrentino. The next ten books were hit or miss. Several favorite authors like Julian Barnes, Ryzard Kapuchinski, Jon Ronson, and Gore Vidal I read quickly. Ronson is best known for The Men Who Stare at Goats, which I haven’t read (but saw the movie) and The Psychopath Test. I received Them: Adventures with Extremists. I discovered a new book by Vladimir Nabokov called The Enchanter, his trial run for Lolita.

However, the misses pile up and I’m near to cancelling the subscription. I’ve tried getting shorter books. Below 200 pages. But the Books Free system works against me and has become my main source of dismay. Book availability is rated four ways: High, Medium, Low, and Rare Book (sic). I have received nothing but “High” for more than year. I have a few left and am not adding more books until I get a few that are Medium available.

Looking over the entire last, I found many reads which stand out the most:

Yellow Dog – Martin Amis                                             
Men and Cartoons – Jonathan Letham    

Elizabeth Costello – J.M. Coetzee                                  
Disgrace – J.M. Coetee           

The Dying Animal – Philip Roth                                     
The Big Clock – Kenneth Fearing

No Country for Old Men – Cormac McCarthy               
Reader’s Block – David Markson
Rashomon and 17 other stories – Ryunosuke Akutagawa    
Identity – Milan Kundera            
Smells Like Dead Elephants: Dispatches from a Rotting Empire – Matt Taibbi                        
Lion’s Honey: The Myth of Sansom – David Grossman