Selecting Books; Selecting Ideas
Some random and vaguely formulated thoughts about books, ideas, and possessions.
I began this year with a commitment both to plan and track my reading more carefully and also to post here in the blog some notes about each of the books. Now, three months in, I find that it’s been very helpful to me, and I even get some hints that others find it helpful as well.
In that earlier post I quoted something from Oliver Burkeman’s Meditations for Mortals that I found (and still find) to be a very good way of framing my reading plan:
… treat your to-read pile like a river, not a bucket. That is to say: think of your backlog not as a container that gradually fills up [and even overflows], and that it’s your job to empty, but as a stream that flows past you, from which you get to pick a few choice items, here and there, without feeling guilty for letting all the others flow by (p. 29).
This morning I read a similar point in something that Jeremy Friesen wrote wrote earlier this month:
I think to what a wise man once said to me and my wife about ideas: “I like to sit along the river of ideas and look at them as leaves floating by. I let many pass me, but some I pluck from the water, look at, and maybe return to the river, or maybe hold for a bit. Some I keep even longer, seeking the mysteries held within.”
It’s worth noting that Jeremy makes this point about ideas in the context of his reflections on his relationship with books. And, of course, books and ideas go together. There’s a selection process involved in each: I choose the books that I read – or do they choose me? — and then I choose the ideas from my reading – or, again, do they choose me?
All of this is in my mind this morning because I spent much of the day yesterday selecting books that I quite literally decided to return to the river: a hefty box of those books is now in transit to Thriftbooks, and an even larger box of books that Thriftbooks wouldn’t buy is sitting in basement storage, awaiting a trip to a local used book store.
Perhaps my experience of the pain of parting with those books is one reason I was struck by a passage from one of James Atlas’s essays this morning. The essay has a simple title: “Money.” He discusses the envy he feels when he notices that many of his friends have been more successful financially than he has. He regrets this envy, and he knows that he is more privileged than many. But he reframes the struggle that he has with that envy, an envy that he can’t completely disavow.
I hve a new idea about what financial success would mean to me. Not the country house refurbished with antiques; not the vacations at Canyon Ranch or the Golden Door; not a fancy car. Of course, I do want these things. When I gaze at a TV advertisement for a Jaguar, hugging the windy road that runs beside the Pacific Ocean, its wheels glinting in the California sun, I don’t think: Nah. Who needs it? My heart aches — fleetingly — to own the Jaguar. But my heart also aches to be free of the desire to own it. “I want, I want, I want,” says Henderson the Rain King, the eponymous hero of Saul Bellow’s novel. I want not to want (My Life in the Middle Ages: A survivor’s tale, p. 86).
I can honestly say that I have no desire to own a Jaguar, but I do want to own more books than I could possibly read (or, as my wife would say, more than we can easily store in our small space). I’m comforted somehow by the thought that at any moment I can pick up a book from the shelf and enter a new world of ideas. But after a weekend of book winnowing, I can also say that there’s some comfort in admitting that there are some books that I’m simply not going to read, and that the ideas in those books — some of which I’ve read and others that I just didn’t get around to reading – will find a home in someone else’s mind. The distinction between ideas and books is helpful. It’s the ideas that I want and that I want to want. I want the books, too, but I want to want fewer of those.