I carry books around a lot. An occupational hazard. As a result I’ve got one shoulder slightly higher than the other. My good mother assures me it’s not noticeable. I was in my hump-back fashion carrying several books or pre-books, what are called galleys or advanced reading copies, during my ride to work today, from Brooklyn to midtown Manhattan.  I must read at every opportunity. We receive hundreds of books a week at our offices, and with fewer and fewer readers available and seemingly less free time in which to read these days, I sometimes think I can hear each of the books keening, making its pitch for review, for “consideration.” (My mother assures me this is not noticeable either – mental defect.)

“Consideration” is a big publishing word, by the way; as is “thoughts,” as in “let me know your thoughts.” The titles I had in my bag were Getting Off: A Woman’s Guide to Masturbation, Richard Price’s forthcoming novel Lush Life, and a newly illustrated edition of Seamus Heaney’s translation of Beowulf; the idea was to consider the books in order that I might share my thoughts. I am obedient if nothing else, and I worry for all the book publicists out there, fear as any lover of literature, of reading, might that they (and their lingo and phone headsets) risk extinction.

I looked at the books in the order I list them above.  The guide to masturbation seemed when I received it to be the superciliest thing I’d ever seen. What woman in this day and age doesn’t masturbate? We are a self-loving society, and it’s been sanctioned by mainstream institutions like Sex and the City, popular writers like Annie Lamott (even after she was born again), and surely Oprah – she’s always offering instruction on how to find happiness; could she have left this off her list? But I was won over by the book. First by verbs like this “fiddle” and “twiddle” (aren’t these new-age elves names?), adjectives like this “suckly” and “bitsy,” and then by surprising lines like this from the “Tips for Touching” section: “Try masturbating while you’re fully dressed by rubbing your cunt up against a piece of furniture or by sitting on your washing machine.” Further facilitating my change of heart was the looks I was getting on the subway car. Two teenaged girls put their shiny heads together and giggled at me. A middle-aged woman in pearls and tweed gave me a lift of her left eye-brow along with a cockeyed smile, and a Hasidic man gave me a stare that communicated both disgust and desire. I should have anticipated this response. I was not alone after all, but I would like to point out that while masturbating should, optimally, be done in private, reading about masturbating need not be. 

These same people were riding with me when I pulled out Price’s Lush Life. It’s not out until March so I don’t want to give too much away – I’d read the book in manuscript and was reviewing my favorite passages about urban living (written in prose so remarkable that I’d be astonished if it didn’t get National Book Award attention next year). We plan to cover it on the April books page, and with any luck those of you who don’t know Price’s work will be encouraged to do so. But on the train, what I had been reading moments ago combined with the novel’s title meant that everyone now or still observing me thought I was reading erotica. If this might induce any one of them to look up Price, to buy his books, it wasn’t up to me to provide correctives.

I switched to Beowulf in a bid for privacy; surely a long Anglo-Saxon narrative poem written at the end of the tenth century would alienate everyone riding to midtown with me. But, no. I had lost the Hasidic man; he’d disembarked at 34th Street. But the woman and the girls and a few other onlookers still eyed me. This owed, I think, to the fact that Norton’s done a great job with the cover (featuring an ancient but dangerous-looking phallic dagger), that the book has pictures, is illustrated, and to Angelina Jolie’s breasts. She and her breasts are among the stars of the new animated film version of the great epic.  I’m tempted to be dismissive of this – the draw of a Hollywood beauty being greater than that of verse – but that would be foolish and hypocritical. I bank on Hef’s beauties to lure readers to our magazine in the hope that they’ll discover a short story by Jess Walter or Denis Johnson equally, albeit differently, engaging. If a film or its leading lady may interest someone in the source work, in Heaney’s fine and determinedly accessible translation, then my or anyone else’s snobbery is counterproductive, self-indulgent. 

But don’t let me tarnish self-indulgences overly: Neither I nor the other books I was “considering” could have gotten quite so much attention this morning on the F train without Jamye Waxman’s Getting Off.  Mean trick? The pleasure principle? Maybe. Those book publicists for whom I worry know all about this, and I’d do almost anything for the cause of reading and writing.  Still, I was relieved to arrive at the 57th Street stop and leave my strange salon behind.