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- [00:07]
A
It's another Thursday, another bookcase, and this one is a unique one. But before I tell you why, I will introduce myself. I am Kate Gibson, and I will introduce the gentleman who's on the video phone with me right now, who's also my father, who he.
- [00:21]
B
I'm the unique father. I'm the Charlie part of the bookcase with Kate and Charlie. We do welcome you. Kate said this is a very different edition of the bookcase. Tell them why.
- [00:31]
A
Well, an old friend of ours who's also a friend and fan of the podcast, whose name is John Doogie, sometimes we exchange text messages if I've turned him onto a new author or he listened to a podcast he's excited about. And he texted me this column by Roger Rosenblatt from the New York Times that was online on December 28th of 2025. So last year. And it was called before you toss that book. And the essay expounds on why we love our bookshelves and why we have an emotional connection with what is just essentially paper and cardboard, and how that relationship with this thing that doesn't feel anything back for you is very sacred. And he would tell you not to throw away your books. And I am myself a bit of a book hoarder, but I wouldn't give it up. I love tracing my life back from the books that I have read. And I forwarded the column to dad and now you can tell him your response. But when I read this essay, I was hooked and wanted to talk to him about it.
- [01:30]
B
Well, we have downsized, your mom and me, and we have had to downsize in terms of the numbers of books we had. And it broke my heart. We gave away 15 boxes of books, and it tore me apart. We went through each and every book. Did we want to save this one because we didn't have enough bookshelves in the place that we were moving to, and we were building new bookshelves, so I got plenty of space, but. And then Katie, of course. And I get a lot of books from publishers that they want us to consider for the podcast. And I've got. I've got trouble storing them, but I had to give up a lot of books. And it's hard.
- [02:09]
A
Yeah.
- [02:10]
B
And Roger says, don't do it if you can keep them. And particularly in your case, Kate, your books and the way you've arranged your library tell the story of your life.
- [02:20]
A
Yeah, I try to keep my bookshelves that you can trace the books back in terms, you know, like this shelf is 2024, this one's 2023. And I try to keep the order that I've read them because they help bring back memories of that time. Like, I remember the book that I was reading when I was so sick with Charlie and pregnant with Charlie, and I read a horror book. And I thought, I shouldn't be reading horror while I'm pregnant because I'm nauseous enough as it is, but so I can trace myself. And I keep a list on my phone, too, so that I can trace my years back in books. It's important to me. If I can tell my entire story from start to finish in the books that I've read, it will be a life well lived. And so when we read this and we were like, oh, a fellow bibliophile, a fellow passionate book collector, a fellow enthusiast about books and reading, we. We just wanted him to read the column to you guys because we'll speak to our audience and we wanted to talk to Roger about all things books, because when you meet a kindred spirit like this, you just gotta blow it up, you know?
- [03:21]
B
Yeah, yeah, exactly. So anyway, here's the essay before you toss that book. Is that right? It's the title. Before you toss that book. This is the essay that appeared in the New York Times written by Roger Rosenblatt, who himself is a fine writer, was once the literary editor of the New Republic. He's done a lot of work for PBS on the subject of books, and we got him to read the column. And then we will. We will talk to Roger. Here's Roger Rosenblatt reading his essay before.
- [03:52]
C
You toss that book. To those of you resolving to clean house in the new year, a word of caution. Throw out whatever you want to throw out. The adorable snapshot of you as a six year old with Roy Rogers horse trigger, that jade bust of Franklin Pierce you picked up for a song at a Vermont auction. But not your old books. Never your old books. It may be tempting to toss them, I know, because they take up so much space and gather so much dust. Yet every book you have is a story of who you are and who you were when you acquired it and who you became when you read it. It's part of you, your present and your history. We may think we finish with books, but they don't finish with us. Books are houses. Once inside, you're transformed and you become the house you entered. I open the doors of Jane Eyre and I'm ushered into the manse of the cold and brooding Rochester. Eventually he thaws and I grow to like him. Feeling Comfortable in the house. But what's that manic laughter coming from the attic? Just like the various places you have lived in, a good book can never be removed from your memory. In my books I have lived in King Arthur's castle and in Ralph Ellison's basement. Each beautiful, startling and revelatory of a universe of thought. Yet the memories can be jarring. I know what I think of my books. What do they think of me? An ignoramus? An innocent, a tabula rasa on whom all these various influences may leave their marks? Someone with the wrong ideas? No ideas. There have been times when I've heard my books talk to me with mocking condescension. Are you shocked by me? Says Vladimir Nabokov with Lolita, disgusted, made uncomfortable in the cellar of a darker, not to say creepier mind. Are you frightened by me? Says Mary Shelley, with Frankenstein. Confused, astonished, made sad and sympathetic. And who is the monster in the story anyway? The Creation or the Creator? And if all that weren't enough to wonder at, how did this tale come to be written by a 19 year old girl? We read books and books read us, especially if we approach them with easy assumptions. Before I gave it serious thought, I took the strange case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde for a story about a dope addict with mood swings. What Robert Louis Stevenson teaches is that under the influence a person may be completely and irredeemably changed. The book says, in effect here, in your facile judgment, learn something about our species. Whatever you think impossible in life is possible. Life is stranger and more dangerous than anything you may ever imagine. And yet more forgiving too. Here on my shelves is the autobiography of the early 20th century Scottish poet, novelist and translator Edwin Muir. He resists psychotherapy at first, but then sees a therapist and understands its value. Writing I saw that my lot was the human lot. And when I faced my own unvarnished likeness, I was one among all men and women, all of whom had the same desires and thoughts, the same failures and frustrations, the same unacknowledged hatred of themselves and others, the same hidden shames and griefs. If one is searching for absolution, look no further. That was a passage I dog eared years ago. One among hundreds of dog eared pages in my books. I wonder what sort of book would be produced by linking all the dog eared pages, incoherent or inspired, or the infinite columns of marginalias standing like beefeater guards beside the original texts. What secret books have I written that hide in all the jottings in the margins, bright new books gleamed like actors in tryouts, destined to grow gray, with faded titles and bends and bruises on the covers. Bleak House went with me to Crane beach in Ipswich, Massachusetts, when I was studying for a university exam. You can still feel grains of sand in the spine. A beaten up book. Childcraft came from my parents house, a children's book my mother used to read to me. I drew pictures next to the poems. A squirrel, a fish, my father's derby hat. To say nothing of the missing books, the spaces created by those reluctantly lent to visitors who never return them. Does one ever learn not to lend books? It's grumpy bad manners to deny the borrowers, to be sure, but look at the holes that once held your valuables. Kidnap victims. If only there had been a ransom. Anatole France wrote that the only books he had in his library were those that others had lent him. Every time one recommends a book to someone else, that book becomes an ambassador, informing and changing minds one will never know about. And who knows how these minds will use their newly gained knowledge? Henry David Thoreau, Oscar Wilde, Ezra Pound. All three wrote or were inspired to write in prison. The thoughts that informed their works were their ways of breaking out. Writing from prison. Hitler nearly destroyed the world with another book. Nelson Mandela nearly rescued it. My books are teachers but also companions who know more than I do and who in the long run wish me well. I would no sooner get rid of them than I would an old friend. More like neighbors standing in their front doors on my shelves, forever extending their welcomes. At night, when my house is dark and I am asleep, do they whisper to one another? Do they gossip about me? Does Hamlet have the last word? As usual, Books of poems, of maps, of adventure, of cartoons, books of photographs, books on philosophy, psychology, philately, history, mystery, art, short stories, tall stories, ghost stories. Right now I am trying to retrieve a passage of poetry that expresses the power of all my books, making the case for holding onto them more forcefully than I ever could. Here it is, the far Field by Theodoretki. A ripple widening from a single stone, winding around the waters of the world.
- [10:04]
B
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- [12:01]
A
Roger Rosenblatt it's such a pleasure to have you in the bookcase. We read this column. We were touched, we were moved. We talked to each other about it a lot and we couldn't wait to talk to a fellow bibliophile such as you. So I want to start with the statistic that came out recently that 40% of Americans didn't read one book in 2025. 40%, I guess. I want to ask you how that statistic makes you feel and how we might be able to change it.
- [12:29]
C
Could you go on to the next question? Kate.
- [12:34]
A
Skip Pass.
- [12:38]
C
I don't know what accounts for it. In a sense, the easy ability to get information or inspiration or adventure from other sources, other platforms than a book, I suppose has been tempting to the extreme so that you have that low percentage of people reading books. On the other hand, if that's the way it's to be, then it seems to me that it's necessary driven for writers to continue to write and try to write the best books possible and draw your audience back. It's a free market. Nobody's going to Tell them you can't do that, or you shouldn't do that, or you're stupid for doing that, because none of that is true. You know, if someone is drawn to an adventure story on the screen more than an adventure story in the pages, it's somehow incumbent on a part of the writer of the adventure on the pages to keep working as hard and as well as he or she can. That may be the easy way out of the answer, but I don't know any other than a sigh, which we can all do, and a sigh of dismay. I don't know how one addresses that subject. I was mentioning to Amanda McMaster earlier when I was literary editor of The New Republic. 40 books a day would come in, and I was alone there, and I had to look through all of these books to decide which books, and there would only be maybe seven or eight a week that would be reviewed. And I tried to. How do I decide? You know, how did these get reviewed? And I do remember that was it Evelyn Wood, who was supposed to be the fastest reader. Right? You can. I left her in the dust.
- [14:23]
B
I got.
- [14:24]
C
I got so good at reading a book in so short a time. So I, in a way, then, you know, join the modern crew is really reading too fast or too carelessly. But your question carries with it so much cultural weight, Kate, that I don't know that I'm capable of answering it, except I do know that usually the way to get something back that you're losing is to do it better.
- [14:48]
B
The interesting part of that corollary to the statistic is we talk every week or almost every week to the owner of an independent bookstore because we think they're so important. And the number of independent bookstores is growing. The population that reads may be diminished, but the number of independent bookstores is increasing. I find that hopeful. A. Yes. How about you?
- [15:14]
C
Absolutely. It's wonderful. There's a wonderful woman, Alice Hutchinson, who has of an independent bookstore in Connecticut and has just resisted every possible tug to take it away from her. And now she's doing wonderfully. In the same statistic that. That you were citing, in the same phenomenon that you were citing. Maybe it's the social life of an independent bookstore that encourages people to go there. It's so much more pleasant than to be in a vast Barnes and Noble or a bookstore that does so many other things. You can barely recognize that it's a bookstore. An independent bookstore is a bookstore. That's all that doesn't pretend to be anything else. And it's wonderful to See?
- [15:55]
A
And I wonder, too. What do you think? And again, I'm. I'm asking you to comment on large, broad social issues based on your essay. And my apologies for that. But I was encouraged. After Covid, I thought to myself, america has realized the importance of books, to get them through difficult times because all of us were isolated. And I was reading, and from the statistics I saw, people were going to libraries and going to bookstores. Have we lost that?
- [16:21]
C
You remind me. Someone has sent me, in response to the piece in the Times, a little magnetized sign that said, a book lover never sleeps alone.
- [16:34]
B
Kate has a shirt that says, bookmarks are for quitters.
- [16:39]
C
That's great.
- [16:40]
B
So let's take it to the personal. Do you ever lend books?
- [16:43]
C
No, not anymore. Nora Ephron, rest her soul, borrowed a book and never returned it and never admitted having stolen it. So I said, that's it. Congratulations, Nora. You're the last.
- [16:58]
A
Nora Ephron was the bridge too far.
- [17:00]
C
She was the bridge too far, okay? And she lied to me. She lied to me. She was so ashamed.
- [17:08]
A
Of course, there are so many people who look at books as sacred. They don't even like to break the spines. And yet in this essay, you admit to both dog earring and.
- [17:18]
C
I know. And I got a lot. Among many letters I said I got. Which told me what to do and how to think, for which I'm eternally grateful. That was one. A big one. How dare you turn down a page or dog ear. A page. Or write in the margins. You know, in the margins. I don't know if you found this at Princeton, Charlie, but at Harvard, you found some of the most interesting writing in the world in the library that people had written in the. In the margins. I found notes from T.S. eliot in the margins of the book. Of a book. Yes. And I was so tempted to steal it, but I did not.
- [17:55]
B
So the letters that you got about the fact that you've dog eared pages and written in the margins, did they all say Roger Heresy? Or did they say, that's kind of neat?
- [18:06]
C
That was the cleanest letter. The. They would have none of me doing this. And a decent man would be ashamed as a result of such letters. But, you know, I'm too old.
- [18:22]
B
What's going to happen to your books when hopefully many years from now, you're gone?
- [18:26]
C
I have no idea. I am not being falsely modest when I say I'm satisfied that I did my best and let it happen. I know apart from my children and grandchildren being burdened with these. These books, I Don't know. I. I very much hope I did something good with these books. That apart from entertainment or whatever modicum of intelligence may have been there, that somebody read that book and said, I understand this more now, and I will be different if that. If that book were to occur, then I'd be more than satisfied. And of course, there's no way of knowing, because was it Samuel Adams or Henry Adams who said, a book affects eternity and so you don't know. It goes out there. Go, little book. You know, Go, little book.
- [19:20]
A
If you're displeased with your children in any way and you're looking for somebody to leave your books to.
- [19:30]
C
Daughters are something, aren't they? They're not only appealing.
- [19:35]
B
They.
- [19:35]
C
Every child, this a fellow taught me at Harvard years ago, said he had four daughters. And he said, every girl child who is born looks up through the film in her eyes, in the crib, sees her old man and thinks, sucker. That was, that was clearly true with the two of you. It's clearly. It was true with my daughter and me. We're glad to be suckers, of course, but we are easily. Easily and happily led around.
- [20:10]
B
I have a pet peeve in all of this, and I have a thought that maybe we need to change the way houses and apartments are built. There are not bookshelves in most houses that are built today. My wife and I have moved to two condominiums in recent years, and neither of them had bookshelves. And we had to spend a lot of money building bookshelves into the place. And I think it bespeaks the fact that we don't honor books enough.
- [20:40]
C
Yeah. Ginny and I did the same thing with our apartment in New York. In fact, immediately I looked around to say, is this wall big enough for the books that I know it's going to have, but I never thought of it from your point of view. Yes. They don't think of it as part of living. I mean, it's a way of saying you absolutely need a kitchen and of course you need a bathroom. But books, that's a luxury. Yeah.
- [21:02]
B
Yeah.
- [21:03]
A
I want to ask you about your perspective, just to take a step backwards as a parent. Did you raise readers? And if so, how did you do it?
- [21:09]
C
Oh, yeah.
- [21:10]
A
How'd you do it?
- [21:12]
C
I read to them a lot and just, Just putting. Putting the kids to bed. And so did Jenny and our. Our oldest son, Carl. I gave him great expectations and he could not stand it. And, and, and he was so. He was just bored. But he's such A good boy. And he. And he wanted to please his old man that he kept saying, oh, this is really good, dad. This is. And I think finally he is now in his 50s. Actually, he just turned 60. He said, you know, Dad, I finished Great Expectations. I still don't like it, But we did a lot of reading to the kids and the. And made it part of their. Part of their life. And we didn't have to do it with any kind of extreme revolutionary thing of saying, no, you can never watch television, or that sort of thing you just made. Again, it's competition. You make the book seem interesting because.
- [22:04]
B
They are, and you make them available. The fact that there are a lot of books around that you see mom and dad reading a lot, it just. It spills down, it transfers. It's something that you pass on to your kids.
- [22:18]
A
I'm going to go back to my question again. So you keep the special ones. How do you decide which ones to lose?
- [22:24]
C
I grew up in a neighborhood called Gramercy park in New York, and there were two apartments. On the floor. Across the floor from ours was that of a fellow named Sidney Homer. He was a financier, but his wife, Mary, his mother, Marion Homer, was an opera singer, and he was the grandson of Winslow Homer, as far as I could tell. He could. He stood 8ft tall. And he would greet me in the hall, saying, well, Roger, when are you enrolling at Harvard? Of course, I didn't know what to make of that, but when I did finally go to Harvard, he gave me a copy of Johnson's Dictionary. Not a first edition, but pretty close. I mean, it may probably is a valuable book, but I never sell it. And when our grandson graduated from Harvard this past spring, I gave it to him. So every book, I think, just as I try to suggest in that little column, every book has something of you in it. And then that attachment is something that you either husband and keep close to you or give it to people you love.
- [23:30]
A
I worked in a bookstore, and it was always a high. During the pandemic, I couldn't get a job, and so I ended up working at Barnes and Noble for about a year, which was a big sprawling store, but the manager had impeccable taste, but it was always a high. Like, I would call my dad at the end today and I would say, I sold two. Niall Williams. I sold three of this. I sold four of that because I don't know what it is about the joy you get in sharing books. It's like you're sharing a piece of yourself. Or a piece of your intellect could.
- [23:58]
C
Never say it better. That's exactly right. Foreign.
- [24:05]
B
You know, Kate, when we did move here to Seattle and I had to downsize our library, probably my. My most valuable book that I own is a signed copy of Charlotte's Web. E.B. white did not sign many books, and we have a signed copy that was given to me when I left Good Morning America. And I thought I'd lost it, and it just tore me apart.
- [24:27]
A
I remember that. The Roman epic of the search. I remember that I was even emotionally attached to the search because. Well, because I want this book someday.
- [24:39]
B
Well, you made a pitch to Roger to get his books. I presume you can do that for me. Yeah, sure. I have Eleanor Roosevelt. I have Barack Obama. I have Barbara Jordan. I have a whole series of signed books that are. That are very valuable and then even some. I was always embarrassed to ask writers when they came onto Good Morning America to sign a book. I thought that was unprofessional. But if they offered, well, how nice of you.
- [25:12]
A
I would be delighted. I wish you had. Then I'd have so much more of a great inheritance.
- [25:16]
B
Yeah. Yeah.
- [25:18]
A
I don't mean to get like. First of all, I just want to say there is somebody who wrote in and said, you're kind of tough on your father. I do want to say I do love him very much. I would not do this all the time as a job if I didn't adore him and think this was an amazing way to spend time with him. So we do love each other. You don't have to phone anyone.
- [25:37]
B
Nobody's written me saying, I'm too hard on you. No, no.
- [25:43]
A
And if one comes and the email address looks like mine, ignore that. It's somebody else.
- [25:49]
B
We finish with a coda from Roger Rosenblatt, and he quotes Edwin Muir, who he mentioned in the discussion that we had. Muir did not believe in therapy with a psychiatrist, but then once he went to it, his whole opinion changed. And that's an important quote that has stuck in Roger's mind.
- [26:09]
A
The book Case with Kate and Charlie Gibson is a production of ABC Audio and Good Morning America. It is edited by Tom Butler of TKO Productions. Our executive producer is Simone Swink. We want to make mention of Amanda McMaster, Sabrina Kohlberg, Arielle Chester at Good Morning America, and Josh Cohan from ABC Audio. Follow the bookcase wherever you get your podcasts, and be sure to listen, rate, and review. If you'd like to find any of the books mentioned in this episode, we have them linked in the episode description.
- [26:37]
C
The quotation from Edwin Muir that I always have around when he goes to see a psychotherapist. And he did not believe in such examinations, and it was such a revelation to him. What he said was, I saw that my lot was the human lot, and when I faced my own unvarnished likeness, I was one among all men and women, all of whom had the same desires and thoughts, the same failures and frustrations, the same unacknowledged hatred of themselves and others, the same hidden shames and griefs. Anything that indicates that we are the same animal and that we're interesting, you know, complicated and interesting, stays with me. And that's why that stays with me.
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