Two years ago I wrote a piece for The Millions called Literature is a Manner of Completing Ourselves–A Reader’s Year. The title is a quote from Susan Sontag. (If you’re a reader you should bookmark The Millions. It’s perhaps the best of the general lit blogs out there.) I came to write that essay because I had for the first time taken note of the books I’d read that year. It–the reading list–was nothing more than a simple spreadsheet, a record, the transcript of a twelve month journey turning pages. (Yes, all the reading was analogue, real paper pages.)
I have below pasted the reading list for 2012. It is interesting to compare the years. This year I read twenty-seven books, not counting the current book which I will finish before year’s end. In comparison to last year, 27 is less by a full 16%. And last year included one thousand page beast, Infinite Jest. No thousand pagers this year. The really interesting comparison is to 2009, the list I wrote about in The Millions. This year by comparison is less 2009 by 27%. That is to say that in three years my reading pace has dropped by 25%. (Too, that year included two books over a thousand pages, Bolaño’s 2666 and Shadow Country by Peter Matthiessen.) A quick calculation brings me to the conclusion that at this pace in about five years I will have stopped reading altogether.
Speaking of reading lists. Are you aware of Art Garfunkle’s? He’s a serious reader who has been keeping tally of books read since the 1960s. Here’s a link. To really drive it home, he goes another step to list his favorite books. Browsing through his list is almost as good as studying the library of a dinner host. (Which beats looking into their medicine cabinet any day.)
Here’s my list of books read in 2011. (I’ve linked the books I reviewed.)
- Jan 7 Bound to Last, 30 Writers on their Most Cherished Book — Sean Manning, Ed.
- Jan 8 The Maine Woods — H.D. Thoreau
- Jan 24 A Widow’s Tale — Joyce Carol Oats
- Feb 19 Portrait of a Marriage — Sándor Márai
- Feb 28 The Foremost Good Fortune — Susan Conley
- Mar 5 Moby Dick — Herman Melville (This was a third reading.)
- Mar 21 The Sweet Relief of Missing Children — Sarah Braunstein
- Mar 28 Tinkers — Paul Harding
- Apr 5 Seeds — Richard Horan
- Apr 25 Fire Season — Phillip Connors
- Apr 30 The Pale King — David Foster Wallace
- May 7 The Mind’s Eye, Writings on Photography and Photographers — H. Cartier-Bresson
- May 15 The Ongoing Moment — Geoff Dyer
- May 30 The Evolution of Bruno Littlemore — Benjamin Hale
- Jun 15 Of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself — David Lipsky
- Jun 21 The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas — Gertrude Stein
- Jul 10 The Tao of Travel — Paul Theroux
- Aug 3 Feathers — Thor Hanson
- Aug 15 The Surf Guru — Doug Dorst
- Aug 20 The Story of Charlotte’s Web — Michael Sims
- Oct 1 Disaster was my God — Bruce Duffy
- Oct 20 The Great Leader — Jim Harrison
- Nov 3 Blue Nights — Joan Didion
- Nov 9 Beautiful & Pointless — David Orr
- Nov 19 Swimming to Antarctica — Lynne Cox
- Nov 29 The Triggering Town — Richard Hugo
Two last notes, should lists be your thing. Here are two that I’ve studied for years. The first is the reading list of St. Johns College in Annapolis, MD. St. Johns is better known as the Great Books School. The entire college education at St. Johns is based on the readings of original texts. Here is the undergrad reading list. It’s heavy duty. A little lighter and less intimidating is the Modern Library list of 100 best: Nonfiction & Fiction. One could do worse than read a few of these.
