As I have done for many years, I submitted my reading list for the past year and an essay to Oregonian columnist Steve Duin’s annual reading contest. Without any further preamble, here’s the essay I submitted in early January:
The last thing I ever expected to announce in a reading
contest essay was that I’m giving up pleasure reading for the coming year. If
you’re anything like the reader I’ve been, the prospect is terrifying.
Books have been my friends forever. My parents read aloud to
me when I was small. My grandmother, folks, and family friends gave me many books
as gifts over the years. I also lived three blocks from the public library in
my hometown, so from age 7 onward, I walked there almost every day.
In high school I was notorious as the kid with the stack of
books. In college, I usually did all the required reading for courses before lecture,
and still took time to read dozens of other books for pleasure.
Carole and I haven’t owned a car in 13 years, so like many Portlanders,
I’ve done a lot of reading on Trimet buses, Max trains, and the Portland
Streetcar. And, as I explained in an essay in the Oregonian several years ago (“The Peripatetic Bibliolater,” Jan.
14, 2012), I often read while walking.
This was pretty unusual even in the Seventies, when I was a
teen in Coos Bay, and it’s no less so today. Most people, if they pause or
weave on the sidewalk, are staring at a glowing implement in their palm, not pages
between covers.
For decades, I’ve read an average of more than a hundred
books a year. Once again, more than 45 years after my first childhood treks to
the library in another city, I live three blocks from the library -- in this
case, the central branch of the Multnomah County Library system -- where I drop
in more days of the month than not.
I also belong to three different book discussion groups: one that’s all men and has been going 12 years, the other two of which are composed
of all women except for me. Those I’ve attended for about three years apiece. You
get the picture? Reading has been my primary addiction. It came in second only
to breathing, eating, and sleeping.
In past Steve Duin reading contests, I’ve typically reported
100 to 140 books for the year, or roughly 30,000 to 40,000 pages. That’s
usually landed me in the top 10 to 20 participants. In 2012 I read 160 books
and 50,158 pages.
But if my totals aren’t significantly lower a year from now,
I’ll have failed in my current objectives. The prospect intimidates the heck
out of me.
Before I explain, let me review the past year’s highlights. Emily
St. John Mandel has been justly celebrated for Station Eleven, a wonderful mélange of acting, post-viral
apocalypse, and good old-fashioned character conflict. I raced through that one.
I also could hardly put down Andy Weir’s science fiction thriller (with an emphasis
on the science), called The Martian. Another
excellent piece of fiction was We Are All
Completely Beside Ourselves by Karen Jay Fowler.
Old dependables like Tana French (The Secret Place), Jo Nesbø (Cockroaches), Ian Rankin (Black and Blue), and Craig Johnson (Junkyard Dogs, Hell Is Empty) gave me pleasure on the police procedural and murder
mystery front.
On the nonfiction side, Elizabeth Kolbert’s The Sixth Extinction has received many
plaudits, and I liked it a lot. Despite the depressing subject, I found the
book fascinating and oddly inspiring: Kolbert takes you to corners of the earth
you never knew existed, and describes the work of scientists who are doing
their best to find, document, assist, and preserve vulnerable (and in some
cases, already disappeared) species of plants and animals.
Norman Davies, whose mammoth Europe: a History took me almost a year to wander through a decade
ago, more recently published Vanished
Kingdoms, which describes a series of European nations and states that
existed, conquered, ruled, and then disappeared from the map. Joan Breton
Connelly’s The Parthenon Enigma is a surprising
history of that gorgeous ruin, which offers a new theory about the purpose
behind its construction.
Other highly worthwhile nonfiction books, assuming the
subject interests you, included The Way
of the Knife: the CIA, a secret army, and a war at the ends of the earth by
Mark Mazzetti; My Promised Land: the triumph
and tragedy of Israel by Ari Shavit; and Command and Control: nuclear weapons, the Damascus incident, and the
illusion of safety by Eric Schlosser.
I was not as impressed with Anjelica Huston’s A Story Lately Told, Malala Yousafzai’s I Am Malala, or one of the year’s book
group darlings, Donna Tartt’s The
Goldfinch. Apparently loudly praised and honored in Europe, Joel Dicker’s
“literary” murder mystery, The Truth
About the Harry Quebert Affair, was just plain clumsy and strained
credulity. On the lighter, pop memoir side, I did enjoy Cary Elwes’s As You Wish: inconceivable tales from the
making of The Princess Bride, and Marja Mills’s The Mockingbird Next Door: life with Harper Lee.
So why have I vowed to give up pleasure reading in 2015? I
need the time and energy for something else. To get something precious, you have
to give up something just as precious. And I have a craving to write more.
I’ve done plenty of writing in the past, from full-time reporting
for a daily paper to free-lance journalism and composing a couple of books
while employed by a small publisher in Boston. Writing itself is not hard.
But finding the space to write -- temporally and emotionally
-- can be a mammoth challenge. Carving out sufficient time in your day, week, and
year; and gathering or conserving the necessary psychic energy to do the
writing . . . that’s the real hurdle. You have to have the self-discipline to
make yourself -- your precious hours and your creative fire -- available for
the writing process.
I think that’s what well-known authors have referred to as
“applying butt to chair.” I won’t be able to do that if I do the easy, familiar
thing of reaching for a book every time I have a free moment.
Reading is a form of wide-awake dreaming. You dream other
people’s dreams: adventures that other people designed, though your mind helps
to create the settings and the characters’ appearance in your head. That can be
immensely calming, exciting, reassuring, and instructive. (Although this
mysterious process may not be as rich and detailed as we like to think; check
out another interesting book I read this year: What We See When We Read by Peter Mendelsund, art director and book
cover designer for Knopf.)
Though it’s much older and perhaps more respected, pleasure
reading is just another way of avoiding the present. All over this city, all
across the nation, people spend much of their waking hours trying to be
somewhere other than where they are: texting at the coffee shop, checking email
on the bus, talking to people far away by cellular phone while walking the
streets (and, all too often, driving them), watching movies on their home flat
screen, tablet, laptop, and even smartphone.
Like those other activities, reading is essentially a
diversion. It diverts you from your own thoughts, your own life -- what’s
really going on both around you and deep inside. That’s part of its charm and
its threat. Pleasure reading can distract you from whatever’s happening in your
life; whatever could be going on in
your head. It can deflect you from becoming the person you ought to be . . .
just as any other diversion can, from yakking on Facebook to zoning out on
music, television, streaming movies, video games, or food and alcohol.
So last week I returned a stack of unopened books and DVDs
to the library. I’ll have to ignore all the unread books on my shelves. I will not
reach for intriguing titles on the new books shelf at the library; hell, I
probably should avoid the library altogether unless I need a specific title for
research.
What will I write? Whatever comes out. I have two book-size
projects about family -- my mother’s Japanese-American side, and my father’s
parents in early 20th century frontier Fairbanks, Alaska -- to tackle as well
as other book ideas, blog posts, and essays. Perhaps even a play script or two.
I’ll force myself to sit until things surface so I can capture them. I will
dream my very own dreams.
Will I give up my three book groups? I think not. They’re a
wonderfully vital social activity for this introvert. So that’s roughly 35 books
I’m still committed to read in 2015: plenty more than the average American’s
ten or 12 per year (depending on which survey you consult; more than a quarter
of all Americans don’t crack a single book all year). But I won’t be choosing
them; they’ll be handed to me. And the total will be far less than my customary
hundred and more.
I expect giving up pleasure reading will at least as hard a
self-discipline to sustain as other people’s New Year’s resolutions to eat
better, do regular workouts, spend more time with family. Given my history and
past habits, it may be harder.
Wish me luck.
That’s what I wrote. Somewhat to my surprise, I still (just barely) made the top ten in the annual reading contest results this year. In an average year, by now I would have completed more than 15 books and in excess of 4,000 pages. My current total is just 5 books and a little over 2,000 pages . . . and probably boosted artificially by the 641-page Second World War history by Rick Atkinson that I had started in December (The Guns at Last Light, volume 3 of the Liberation Trilogy) and only finished this calendar year.
And I’ve drafted a couple chapters of my book about my grandmother. So I’m doing all right so far.
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