In honor of a new year (and my finally remembering to start writing 2017 for the date) it’s time to post an update on my reading progress, since that’s part of the reason I started doing this in the first place.
Since I started keeping track last April, I’ve read 20 books, which is WAY more than I read over the same timeframe in 2015. Two of those books had been sitting in the stack next to my bed for three years, and one (The Epic of Gilgamesh) had been there for four. That feels pretty good.
The problem is that in that same timeframe I’ve also bought/found/received as gifts/stumbled on and had to pick up more than twenty books, so that the stack’s actually grown to 39 books total(!). Stacked one on top of the other, it’s almost three feet tall and towers over my bedside table, teetering dangerously far backward in danger of falling. That’s a lot of books.
My stack of books to read (note doorknob in background…).
I got a fair number of books for Christmas (9), and one of those books was David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest, which is over a thousand pages long with very small print and sits intimidatingly above a few hardcovers near the bottom of the stack. (I’ll get to that one later, I think.)
When I was younger, I used to read new books in the order I picked them up, though I stopped doing this when the stack grew too big and I got frustrated that I couldn’t read books that I was really interested in quickly enough. Now I sort all my books by size (which also helps balance the stack) and choose what to read depending on my mood at the time—for example, so I’m not reading a whole bunch of nonfiction or Haruki Murakami books all in a row. I like this system a lot more because it gives me more control, but still helps me stay organized and on top of what I want to read.
In recent years I’ve also been buying fewer new books in an effort to control the stack’s height, so most of the books I pick up are ones people give me (either as gifts or because they’re getting rid of them) or that I find in free piles, flea markets, or used bookstores for offers too good to pass up. Most of the books I actually seek out and buy are ones I REALLY want to read or ones I’m afraid I’ll forget about if I don’t pick them up at that exact moment, but this generally doesn’t happen as often anymore. I keep telling myself that if the stack ever falls below ten books I’ll start actively buying again, but there’s no chance of that happening soon.
I think a lot about the book Tristram Shandy where the main character’s telling his life story but goes off on so many tangents that it takes him two hundred pages to get to the day of his birth. At one point he talks about how it’s taken him a year of writing just to cover that one day, and since every day he spends writing is another day of his life he’ll eventually have to record, at his current rate he’ll fall 364 days behind for every day he actually gets down on paper.
Reading feels like that sometimes, since I keep finding more and more books I’d like to read as more time passes than I could ever read them in, and as with everything else I’d like to do, there’s only so much time.
One of my literature-minded friends once told me that she’d long ago given up trying to read all the books she ever wanted to and instead decided to focus solely on her main areas of interest because those were the things most important to her. This philosophy bothered me because even though the main thing you’re interested in is important, there’s a whole big world out there full of other stuff worth learning about, and deliberately cutting yourself off from exploring it automatically narrows your worldview by closing you off to other things, and I never want that to happen to me.
The compromise seems to be to balance reading things you’re primarily interested in with other things that seem cool too, and this balance is going to look a little different for everyone. That’s part of what makes it fun, and the process of constantly learning new things keeps you happier and sharper, like Anna Akana talks about in this video.
That’s all for now—I’ve got to get back to work.