Books, Books, Books

I am not a bookworm. My older sister, my dad, and a couple of my younger brothers—okay so all of my family really—seem to go through books like Kleenex tissues during flew season. They suck out the information, the plotlines, the characters as though drinking from juice boxes. Their lips meet their straws and almost instantly you hear the slurping sound of nearly-empty cartons being vacuumed clean.

I didn’t start reading for pleasure until late high school, and even then it was a non-fiction book on U2. The Summer before my Junior year of College, however, a friend recommended The Catcher In The Rye by J.D. Salinger. I read it in about three weeks (this was actually rather quick for me), and I never looked at literature the same way again. That may sound dramatic, but it was. I remember tearing up while reading the final pages in the corner of a Starbucks (I’ll talk about the peculiarities of that common environment in a later entry). I had never read a book that couldn’t conceivably be adapted to another medium, such as film or theatre. There was just no way this work of genius, especially this Holden guy, could be portrayed outside of a book. So I started reading.

I have started several books in the last couple years and only finished a few of them. I am a slow reader, and I get distracted easily. There are some common acronyms out there that may apply to my condition (most include the letters A and D, some O and C), but the bottom line is that I have trouble paying attention. Anyway, I’m learning to be OK with the fact that I don’t finish books quickly, or at all. What’s interesting, however, is that I think of any uncompleted book as a “current read.” This would mean I am “currently reading” the following:

The Shack by William P. Young

When You Are Engulfed in Flames by David Sedaris

Lord Of The Flies by William Golding

1984 by George Orwell

Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austin

From Fear To Freedom by Rose Marie Miller

God, Heaven and Har Magedon: A Covenantal Tale of Cosmos and Telos by Meredith Kline

Making Sense of Wine by Matt Kramer

About A Boy by Nick Hornby

Songbook by Nick Hornby

Everything Is Illuminated by Jonathan Safran Foe

Franny and Zooey by J.D. Salinger

The Reason For God by Tim Keller

A Long Way Down by Nick Hornby

How to Be Good by Nick Hornby

Gone: The Last Days of The New Yorker by Renata Adler

Friend Raising by Betty Barnett

Saturday Night by Susan Orlean

My Name Is Asher Lev by Chaim Potok

The Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad

The New NEW Journalism by Robert S. Boynton

Perfect Girls, Starving Daughters: The Frightening New Normalcy of Hating Your Body by Courtney E. Martin

And probably a few that don’t come to mind. Whatever this list may say about me (my tastes, my over commitment and consequential lack of true devotion, my desire to read minor Hornby novels, etc.), it’s been floating around in my subconscious—and my consciousconscious—for a while. What am I to do? And then there are all of the classics such as Catch 22, The Grapes of Wrath, Wuthering Heights, and those current best sellers that are actually supposed to be good, and then the books that Barnes and Noble declares to be “quintessential reads,” and also the Harry Potters (which are actually pretty fantastic, though I’m only one deep), and then the local newspaper and also the New York Times, and then Wired and The New Yorker, and Paste and Rolling Stone, and then books of poetry, and this list has gone on long enough. Whew. 

Reminding myself that I could devote the rest of my natural life to reading and barely scratch the surface (maybe gouge it a little) helps me relax. And even if I managed to read it all, if that was all I did, I would be like the philosopher who gets hit in the head with a Frisbee while sitting under a tree vacillating on whether or not to believe in a physical reality. There is too much life to live. Maybe someday I will pick up My Name Is Asher Lev and try for a third time to get past page 31, maybe I won’t.