In seven minutes, my one week without reading any books will come to an end. I have been aware all day that the time has been coming, though not obsessively. I haven't been counting the minutes: "Only 2 hours, 27 minutes from now, I'll be on the couch reading page 1 of The Partly Cloudy Patriot by Sarah Vowell!" Rather, I've been wondering whether I would be on the couch with a book by the end of the day. I'm not sure whether I'm going to head in there after I write this and pick up a book or whether I want to extend my book fast another few days.
This has been such a busy week that I have hardly missed reading, though I have noticed that my son and I have been to the park almost every day, and my to-do list is very up-to-date. David and I were just IM-ing, and he commented that I seem very productive. I told him, "Since I can't read anything, often I have nothing better to do than work." He laughed, but it's true.
I did not return any books to the library unread, but I find that after this short break my frenzied sense of "must read! must read these books!" has abated, and it's possible I'll return them unread now. It's been a good week, and I am wondering whether I might not want to build on this experience by being more selective about how I spend my reading time.
Actually, I have a project in mind. We moved in December, and the spare room/library/study is not quite unpacked. But once it is, I might read my way through our collection, partly as a way of re-visiting beloved old books and partly as a way of weeding some of them out: there are a lot of books in there I thought were really good when I was in my twenties. What would I think of them now?
Another project I am thinking of is My 200 Best Books. I was chatting with a friend a couple of weeks ago, and heard myself saying, "What if instead of reading so many books, we just read the couple of hundred that were most valuable to us over and over? Think how well we'd get to know them!" It's fun to imagine the list: mine would start with Jane Austen, Walt Whitman (who conveniently just kept writing the same one book over and over), Thoreau's Walden, Kathleen Norris's Dakota and Amazing Grace, Cryptonomicon of course, Faith and Practice, Mary Oliver's New and Selected Poems. Just off the top of my head.
I suspect these two projects would go well together, that by the time I got through the re-reading of our collection, my 200 best would be most of what remained.
I would love to hear other people's short lists of essential reading.
Posted by Su Penn at March 25, 2003 04:04 PM | TrackBack