Gatsby in an age of Google

Gatsby in an age of Google

Sunday, February 8, 2004
Gatsby in an age of Google
Copyright © 2003 Blethen Maine Newspapers Inc.

I've got them all packed now, into a quartet of cardboard boxes. These are the last of the hundreds of books I've collected since my late 20s, each one a snapshot of my past, a collection of years, some of which I would not care to repeat.

Last year and the year before, I packed and gave away more than 450 books to the local library, leaving only those I considered indispensable. It was a painful parting.

Books, if you keep them long enough, gather a kind of spiritual and psychic dust. There are the signed ones, gifts from one's children or friends now deceased; some from the authors, now long gone. They wrote these, signed them to me. How can I part with them? I must.

Wonderful column, about books, about the knowledge they can bring of the past, about Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Gatsby, and America.. how did this come to me; from a Google alert that I run, irony of ironies.. by "J.P. Devine of Waterville is a former free-lance columnist for the Los Angeles Times."