(8:09 PM) | Adam Kotsko:

Gift Certificates

I received a gift certificate to Barnes and Noble for my birthday, and I just got back from using it. I have a wide variety of philosophical issues related to the appropriate way to spend a gift certificate, particularly for books. The dilemma is accentuated in this case by the fact that the gift certificate was enough for just one book --- the pressure was intense.

The first issue is that a gift is not quite a gift if it isn't surprising. During my youth, birthdays and Christmas were pretty well a done deal by November -- for whatever reason, Hannah and I were encouraged to write detailed lists, and we always got what we wanted, in detail. I often asked for too many things in the hopes that I would be surprised at least by what I didn't get, but the gap was always somehow closed. I know this might sound like I'm whining because I got too much for Christmas, but I'm not sure how much good it really did me. It trained me to be very uncomfortable with genuinely unexpected gifts, because unexpected gifts usually came from relatives who barely knew me and thus ended up sucking hardcore.

I have very rarely gotten a sincerely thoughtful, decentering type of gift, one that wasn't already taken into account in advance, with a place reserved for it. In my old age, I am able to simulate this with gift certificates to book stores. I attempt to surprise myself, and it usually ends up working. First, I cannot buy anything that I already know I "should" read. I am tempted to do so, because as regular readers know, I am following an obsessive course of self-education. I have demonstrated to myself that I am capable of dutifully wading through any number of unappealling books, whether I enjoy it directly or not. So some rejected books included Bleak House and Capital.

I thought about getting a book about science or math or something I don't normally read about (since I'm apparently only able to read dumb philosophy books), but as soon as I picked up A Brief History of Time, I realized that Barnes and Noble's selection was not amenable to spontaneity. Due to the lack of notably "cool" books, I would be entering into a new topic by dutifully reading the canonical books.

The only section that has many "cool" books is the "Literature and Fiction" section, so I went there. I first checked out Don DeLillo's Mao II, but it started to feel like a piece of my abortive quest to read the Complete DeLillo, so I couldn't do that. I picked up Proust's second volume of In Search of Lost Time, as well as Marquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude, remembering some good emotions associated with both of the authors, but I didn't think a gift from myself should be some hackneyed attempt to recapture the past. Kundera lost out as well, because he is too canonical -- of course I wanted to read his Big Book, which showed I was more interested in having read the book than in actually reading it.

I finally settled on Independence Day by Richard Ford. It's contemporary white male American fiction, an area with which I am already sufficiently familiar that I don't need to read only canonical books, but that I am not so tired of that reading in that area feels like a chore. It was recommended, indirectly, by Dr. Belcher back in my undergraduate heyday, so I did not decide entirely on my own that Richard Ford was someone who needed to be read -- I had to trust someone else. Plus it completely messes up my reading pattern, which was previously going to be an alternation between hardcore German theology and hardcore leftist psychoanalytic-influenced theory (essentially an alternation between letting Craig Keen and Slavoj Zizek be my guides).

I feel like I came close to simulating a gift. Maybe after a few warm-up rounds with gift certificates, I'll be able to handle the emotional pressure of receiving an actual gift directly from someone else.

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