“Books well used are among the best things, abused among the worst.” Ralph Waldo Emerson

I love Emerson’s philosophies because they often center around the idea that we should do our own thinking.

This is an important philosophy when it comes to books, I think. Too often, we see a book held up as Truth (capital T intended) or at least the Truth of the moment (think DaVinci Code) that kind of sweeps us all along in the current of its thinking, until much later, we emerge, shake the water out of our ears and go, okay, maybe not.

Some books are regarded as having more worth than others because of when and by whom they were written. We treat with skepticism modern writers with their non-linear reflections and questioning rather than proclaiming style and hold up anything written by dead white guys from days of yore (aka, the classics). We see biography and history regarded as more valid than fiction, and lately, and even within the fiction genre, we find multiple sub-genres: romance, realism, magical realism, sci-fi, speculative fiction, chick lit, and you get the idea.

But with these simple categorizations, we miss, well, we miss a lot. My good friend, Christopher Barzak, has written two novels that defy these kinds of easy genre-based descriptions. The most recent, The Love We Share Without Knowing, is particularly difficult to pin down. This is its strength.

If you’re looking for a typical love story: boy meets girl, is confronted with a significant obstacle to her affections, overcomes obstacle, love wins in the end, then this is not the book for you (you want something by Nicholas Sparks). Instead Chris’s novel doesn’t provide us with easy or even any answers about love. We get questions in a world where the dead and living hold company together and where people drift between these two worlds in dreams and even in the guise of a fox. Love becomes dark and grasping, lonely and desperate, and it refuses to be silenced by death. And yet the darkness doesn’t exist just for darkness’s sake but rather to make room for the light because in the midst of the lonliness and death we come to realize what is at the heart of the novel’s overlapping stories. The ghosts are supernatural manifestations of a truth that is presented as a hunch…that we leave in others’ lives our traces, our love, in more ways than we will ever fully realize.

Chris, along with two others from the Oakland Center for the Arts, formed a book club based on the more democratic idea that written expression is valid. Period. Chris, Brooxie, and Ric began the book club (of which I am now the caretaker) with six book choices that were as diverse as the people choosing them. The idea was always that we weren’t going to be one of *those* book clubs that only read the classics or books that had otherwise been culturally stamped as worthy. We’ve taken this idea one step further and recently created a member-suggested reading list that includes a graphic novel, a collection of short stories, a feminist pulp novel set in 1930’s New York, and Japanese fiction.

That’s the abuse, I think, to which Emerson refers. The abuse occurs when certain books are deemed as having the answers and other books are cast aside as not worth our attention. No, he would say, that’s not how we use books well. We use books, fiction or non-fiction, as windows into the culture in which they were created. They are glimpses, nothing more. It is up to us to make Truth and then to redefine it when we need to.