In his curiously bloodless memoir Books, Larry McMurtry says, “A bookman’s love of books is a love of books, not merely the information in them.” This explains as much as the author wanted if taken alone, but seen in the context of a life, it reveals a great deal more.

I say curiously bloodless because I have no doubt of McMurtry’s love, nor his ability to explain it. He is both an accomplished author and a successful bookman. His experience at those vocations is prodigious. Yet, he seems reluctant to bare his soul now in either calling. As if he is speaking to an unfriendly audience.

A few years ago I read McMurtry’s quest, Roads, with even less satisfaction. I love to drive. I was blessed with children who enjoy the journey, and my youthful joy at being on the road to somewhere was carried on through the more problematic years of being a father with the pleasure of my family. McMurtry writes of his own journeys as if he was cataloguing and even doing that in the manner of an old librarian long bored with his task.

Ah! I said to myself. Perhaps an answer to the puzzle!

I once knew a librarian–an ancient woman, perhaps forty or forty-five years old–when I was nine. She was my nemesis at the small Larchmont Public library at the time I was first discovering books. Her interest in books seemed entirely focused on preserving them in order, and my entertainment at the time was easily found in ways to create disorder. Certainly, in retrospect, I have enlarged my role in her life. I suspect she never even knew I existed beyond a dirty face that she banned from the premises on several occasions and frequently told to be quiet. But that’s the meat of it, is it not? The truth does not lie in the mere fact of my petty tricks and her ire, but in the very human chemistry I felt, and in the role I took for myself as a sort of nine-year-old juvenile delinquent cum Robin Hood.

I could never remember to bring the books I took out back again on time and was perpetually in debt to that small institution. It was necessary for me to liberate books in a way that allowed me the freedom to read them in my own good time. I became a thief. Among other things. I was also a liar. Thieves must always turn to lying in order to preserve their deeds. True, I always returned the books–all but one. And this, in itself was a larger challenge at times. Years later I discovered I had a small library-bound copy of a Mentor history series called The Age of Reason which had been overlooked on a darkened lower shelf. It caused me a great deal of angst and then again, a fine amount of remembrance.

And there we are with my critique of Mr. McMurtry again. His memoir lacks remembrance. This is a man who recreated the angst of his youth in The Last Picture Show. He could even famously recapture the west of his grandfathers and the great cattle-drives with Lonesome Dove. What then is his problem with Books?

I have known hundreds of bookmen in my life. Of course, I see them through my own lens. I am uninterested here in the majority who sell books because they haven’t the talent to deal with anything that is not uniformly square and alphabetically identifiable. Most of those are as bored of their work as the typical librarian, and just as sensitive to their weakness. They know in their cold hearts that they do not love books. Becoming a book dealer happened to them on their way to other dreams–as it did to almost all of us–but they never accepted their fate like a good lover does when they realize there is no escape.

I am interested in bookmen who love books, if for no other reason than to gain some footing on the ledges of my own psyche. Mr. McMurtry loves books. Why can’t he transfer that to his own memoir of that love affair?

I can only speculate.

His, at its core, is an unhappy relationship. He tells us it was begun in a gift of nineteen books at a time when his home was otherwise barren of even a Bible. Yet he is unsure of what titles were in that nineteen. I am positive that Mr. McMurtry could correct me on a thousand points of issue when it came to one title or another. How is it that the content of those nineteen had so little impact? I can and do forget my own phone number, but I can tell you within a very high degree of precision–say 75%–all of the books I read on my own from the age of nine to twelve. At twelve I begin to lose accuracy because I was swallowing more than two books a week.

I have always been intrigued with style. I am greatly impressed with the conjuring of an author. When I encounter a good trick I will often stop and reread the passage to see the sleight of hand again. It makes me happy.

I like detail. Patrick O’Brian books can get soggy with it, but that’s fine. Some people like detail more than others. I love the description of the whaling industry in Moby Dick and the building of the cathedral in Hugo’s Notre Dame or the battle of Waterloo in Les Miserables. But I can understand why people might skip those parts.

I am awed by the capturing of character in a few words. I was never as impressed by Fitzgerald as my teachers were because Gatsby is an empty figure despite all the trappings, Daisy is at best ‘objectified’ to use a currently popular term, and Nick is a cypher. The best characters in that too slim volume are secondary. Fitzgerald should have studied Trollope, Jane Austen, or Conrad.

What I am saying is that I enjoy content. I suppose it is alright to enjoy a book for its reputation among other readers. That’s certainly why most people read a given title to begin with. God forbid anyone should criticize F. Scott. Or Salinger. Or Roth. But I do because I’m an atheist, so God does not talk to me. He yells. And I take great joy in that as well. I don’t presume that my opinion is truth, much less fact. I am more likely to be wrong than right, in that my ignorance is profound. But I have my opinion and it is based on an experience with books which has shaped my life. It is as visceral as the love I have for my family. I don’t check it at the door with my hat because someone has told me to.

Mr. McMurtry should sit at his typewriter again, and insert a new ribbon, however difficult that is for him. He should sit down once more and tell us about his love for books. I want to know. I want details. I want slabber and stink. I want to know the kind of thing that will make me understand myself. Otherwise, what’s a book for?