Ripping Books (Literally)

I think that, of all the media we have available to us these days, books enjoy a strange, exalted, and rigid place in most of our minds. After all, I can be watching TV, flip channels, and start watching a show, even a movie, halfway through (or even just at the end). The entire Internet, with its search engines and feeds, is designed for users to almost surgically extract the pieces of information they want out of longer works. When listening to music, it is no big deal to catch the ending of a song or piece and then come back and hear the rest of it some other time. But with books, especially with fiction, there is an idea that one must always start at the beginning and read in the prescribed page order to the end. Any other way would be “cheating”.

Also, books enjoy an almost idol-like reverence in that many are averse to doing anything to a book that would “deface” it. In fact, if the front cover is ripped off a paperback, whoever comes across it is often warned within the book itself that it has been stolen! Now how would the book know that?

Why bring this up?. Because, with the millions and millions of books being published each year, this kind of book-reverence makes no sense. Sure, I think it’s pointless to skip around in a novel. But regarding the physical intactness of a book, I’ve found that it’s sometimes better to rip off manageable sections of a novel, staple together the pages, and stuff them in my pocket to be read at my own convenience, without lugging around an entire volume. I wouldn’t do this with some old, out-of print books I have. But I commonly pick up used paperback novels around town at 25-50 cents a copy. And when I’m done with a book, it often looks as if I ate it, not read it! Now I know this biblio-mutilation might horrify some, but I would have to ask, “Why?” In our distant past, books were primarily used as religious texts, and before printing existed and later, before books were mass-produced, a book was a relatively dear and rare object. But not today.

I feel that by “book-ripping”, I am able to read much more as I go through my daily walk through life than if I just kept intact books, often in places where I didn’t have access to them.

People traditionally have a hang-up with the written word, anyway. To say about an idea that “it is written” is somehow supposed to make it more true than if “it isn’t written”. And if what “is written” is part of a very old text, well …. end of discussion, it’s gospel truth! Speaking of that, I do read the Bible from time to time and have no shortage of inexpensive Bibles in my possession. So I rip pages from time to time from a Bible to read as well. I wonder what some folks would think about that. Ironically, by actually esteeming the content of the writing by reading it, I am respecting the writer's intent more than if I were just to leave the book lying somewhere, in good shape but essentially unread.

Also, there may be an cultural aversion to destroying a book, based on both the Nazi book-burnings of the 1930s and Ray Bradbury’s futuristic science fiction novel Fahrenheit 451. But as I said before, I only do this with books that I procured cheaply and which I can easily access (through bookstores, libraries, and the Internet) should I want to read them again.

I read my last Stephen King novel The Long Walk this way and am now working on his Roadwork likewise. It works! Of course, everyone has their own reading strategies. Always being able to carry some reading material with me in an unobtrusive way trumps any concern I may have about damaging books. Besides, like anything else, books can get to be quite a clutter in themselves. How about disposing of them in an environmentally-friendly manner (after ripping and reading them)!