Donald Barthelme’s Syllabus

There was a time when I fought against an impatience with reading, concealing, with partisanship, the fissures in my education. I confused difficulty with duplicity, and that which didn’t come easily, I often scorned. Then, in my last year of college in Gainesville, Florida, I was given secondhand a list of eighty-one books, the recommendations of Donald Barthelme to his students. Barthelme’s only guidance, passed on by Padgett Powell, one of Barthelme’s former students at the University of Houston and my teacher at the time, was to attack the books “in no particular order, just read them,” which is exactly what I, in my confident illiteracy, resolved to do.

But first I had to find the books, a search that began at Gainesville’s Friends of the Library warehouse book sale. Early morning, the warehouse parking lot was filled with about fifty men, women, and children waiting for the doors to open. At the front of the line were the all-nighters, hard-core sci-fi fans, amateur Civil War historians, and chasers of obscurities, rumored to have been there since before midnight. Some had brought with them hibachis and coolers and battery-powered radios, giving the parking lot the feel of a Gator football pre-game with less angry hope.

When the garage door opened, I watched the all-nighters sprint into the warehouse, toward the wall-to-wall shelves and the sixty or so tables of books, the odor of dampness and dust. Some books were arranged by subject, others democratically, Dead Souls rubbing sleeves with Pregnancy for Dummies. By the time I made it inside, those ahead of me had already secured their spots: little kids rummaging through the picture books in the far corner, a guy in winter fatigues looking through the vintage Penthouses, a graduate student with an Ask Me About Postmodernism pin on his army-surplus backpack solemnly problematizing the literary criticism section.

The books on sale were mostly disused and shabby, dustjackets ripped or discarded, the stamp of the Alachua Public Library on their fly leaves and tape marks on the spines. Toward the front of the warehouse was a collector’s room with inscribed books by local authors like Harry Crews and Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings, but the real activity was here in the aisles. As a section’s inventory ran low, library volunteers carted out cases of books from the front of the warehouse to replenish it. Shoppers rushed to help the volunteers unload the books, filling their own boxes as they did, often holding up and announcing their windfall. “Copy of Nabokov’s Lectures!” “Copy of Ariel!”

The first book I found was a pocketbook version of A Homemade World...