Still reading; still wondering what to read next
I’ve written more than once — see here and here and here and here — about my struggle to decide what to read and why to read it. I suppose I’m still in withdrawal from years of teaching, when each fall and summer I would have to lay out the list of texts that I’d be reading with my students the next semester. It provided a structure to the reading, and I was always fascinated to see the sorts of discussions that were prompted by reading the texts in the community of a classroom. So many times, these discussions helped me to see something I hadn’t seen before in a text that I had read dozens of times.
I still like to read, and find it difficult to imagine a life without reading. A tangent — earlier this week at breakfast my wife wondered whether one of her former colleagues is still reading. This colleague was an avid reader of literature, but she’s evidently struggling with advancing age. As my wife pondered this question, she said to me: “I hope you don’t ever lose the ability to read.” The thought has occurred to me. I’m old enough now to anticipate all sorts of “this is the last time that I’ll ever do this” (or, perhaps more likely, “that was the last time I’ll ever do that”) moments. Reading and bicycling are near the top of that list.
But I digress. As I’ve already admitted, knowing that I want to read doesn’t offer much guidance in the decision what to read. I was relieved this past summer to learn that I’m not the only person facing this particular challenge. Consider this from Moyra Davey:
“What to read?” is a recurring dilemma in my life. The question always conjures up an image: a woman at home, half-dressed, moving restlessly from room to room, picking up a book, reading a page or two and no sooner feeling her mind drift, telling herself, “You should be reading something else, you should be doing something else.” The image also has a mise-en-scène: over-stuffed, disorderly shelves of dusty and yellowing books, many of them unread; books in piles around the bed or faced down on a table; … a pile of bills, a sink full of dishes. She is trying to concentrate on the page in front of her but a distracting blip in her head travels from one desultory scene to the next, each one competing for her attention. It is not just a question of which book will absorb her, for there are plenty that will do that, but rather, which book, in a nearly cosmic sense, will choose her, redeem her. Often what is at stake, should she want to spell it out, is the idea that something is missing, as in: what is the crucial bit of urgently needed knowledge that will save her, at least for this day? She has the idea that if she can simply plug into the right book then all will be calm, still, and right with the world (Index Cards, p. 183).
How did she get into my house? How did she get into my mind? I don’t know the answer to the first question, but I know how she got into my mind. I was in a book store, ignoring for the moment the books I already had on my “what I’m reading now” list, picked up Davey’s book, and stumbled on the passage I’ve just quoted. How could I not keep reading the book?
And so I walked out of the bookstore with that book, despite the fact that I had a published commitment to be reading several other books. And I read the rest of that essay. It was very interesting, but also a problem: Davey suggested several other essays and books that I might be reading.
And so I bounce from book to book, finishing many of them, but leaving others unfinished for the moment. I’ve accepted the fact that I live in a condo with my own antilibrary; perhaps I should come up with a label for those books I’ve begun to read, and still hope to finish, but for the moment lie dusty and yellowing in one of the piles around my desk.
