Tracking My Reading and Books on Tap

As I write this entry in January 2025, I’m continuing to think about just what I’m trying to do and how best to do it. I’ve contemplated adding a section like this to my blog for some months. I’m not interested in merely listing the books I’m reading – “Hey, world! look at what I’m reading!” My selfish interest in doing this, and in doing it publicly (for the relatively few people who stumble into this small corner of the internet) is to hold myself accountable not only for reading the books I’ve decided to read but also (and more importantly) to push myself to think more carefully about what I’m reading. Doing it publicly is also part of the larger plan to move more of my thinking and writing into a public space — call it a digital garden. Even on a site as rarely visited as this one, there’s something about knowing that it’s available to others that changes my relationship to my thinking.

So I see this entry and other entries in this “What I’m reading” section as a work in progress. Pages below from 2024 and earlier are refugees from the regular blog stream, moved here because I think they fit better here. But if you bother reading them you’ll see that they’re a rather different sort of beast.

The practice of identifying books that one wants (or wants to want!) to read is standard enough to have its own #TBR hash tag, and I have many entries in unpublished notes with that tag. The list below is a rather severely winnowed list of my much-too-massive list of texts that at one time or another I’ve though I might want to read. It’s clear to me that I will never read everything on that list, even if I could somehow resist the urge to add yet more titles to it. It’s not just that the bucket of TBR books is full; it’s overflowing.

On that note, earlier this week I stumbled onto some very good advice regarding a too-be-read pile. It comes from Oliver Burkeman, in his book Meditations for Mortals.

… 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).

I’m not one for drama, but I have to admit that when I read that I felt my shoulders rise up just a bit, almost as if a load had been removed. A load that I’ve been carrying for a long time.

So, here’s my plan for the moment. That list of books included in the rather large collection of notes in my journaling is the river – a rather large river. What I’m planning to include below is a small sub-set of those books. They’re books that I find intriguing enough, and enough in line with my current interests, to imagine reading relatively soon. If a book is on this list, I’ve selected it from the large “Wouldn’t it be good to read that someday?” list to the much shorter “I’m thinking I’d really like to read this now” list. The monthly entries below (so far there’s only one) includes those books that I’m actually reading alongside those books that I’ve already finished reading in that particular month. That listing serves the purpose of holding me accountable for reading the books that I’ve decided to read. After completing a book, I’m planning to write some summary comments about it. I see these comments not as a traditional book review, but rather as a statement of what I’ve found valuable for my own purposes. Perhaps they’ll be helpful to others as well; but I’m really interested here in pushing myself to think more about what I’m reading.

But enough of that. Here’s the current list of “a few choice items” I’m planning to read, as I set aside the still present guilt I feel for not reading all the others on that unpublished list:

• Ben Ware, On Extinction: Beginning Again at the End.
• Mark Lilla, Ignorance and Bliss: On Wanting not to Know.
• Edwin Frank, Stranger than Fiction: Lives of the Twentieth-Century Novel.
• Joseph Henrich, The Secret of our Success: How culture is driving human evolution, domesticating our species, and making us smarter.
• Laura Beers, Orwell’s Ghosts: Wisdom and warnings for the twenty-first century.
• Mary McCarthy, A Bolt from the Blue and other essays (selections).
• Elizabeth Hardwick, The Collected Essays (selections).

And some books that I really want to read again, to re-visit in light of other things I’ve read more recently:

• Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition.
• Alfred North Whitehead, Science and the Modern World.
• Alfred North Whitehead, Adventures of Ideas.
• Collin McGinn, Prehension: The Hand and the Emergence of Humanity.