"What an astonishing thing a book is. It is a flat object made from a tree with flexible parts, on which are imprinted lots of funny dark squiggles. But one glance at it and you're inside the mind of another person. [...] Writing is perhaps the greatest of human inventions, binding together people who never knew each other, citizens of distant epochs. Books break the shackles of time. Books are proof that humans are capable of working magic." Carl SaganDespite the advice writers get to journal, I was never able to engage regularly in the practice, especially in regards to my day-to-day life. I tend to be the person who is so exhausted at the end of the day that I fall asleep almost as soon as my head hits the pillow. Reflecting on and documenting my rather mundane life as the warning light on my personal battery begins to flash is an exercise in futility. I am lucky to get a few pages of reading in before my brain turns out the lights.
However, I have been able to keep two long-term journals of a different sort. One is a journal of quotes and poems I have collected over the years. Naturally, I organize them around a single word which encapsulates the theme of the quote or the gist of the poem. The second journal is a list, beginning in the millennium, of all the books I have read, including date of completion, title and author. To be clear, the list only includes books I have read from cover to cover. I mention this because I read prolifically elsewhere as well, particularly articles in newspapers, magazines, periodicals, and online sources. Further, I have had to work hard over the years to give myself permission to stop a book I began that didn't grab me. This may be due in part to my obsessive, perfectionist personality and in part to my years as a graduate student, who had to plow through stacks of obligatory reading -- personal interests be dammed! Somehow I always struggled to sacrifice the time already invested and set a book aside midstream.
Recently, I took the time to look more closely at the list of books I have read over eighteen years. I was inspired after reading the following from a Philip Roth interview in the New York Times:
C.M. What have you been reading lately?Don't you love the way Roth recounts what he has been reading like a series of clues he uncovered or a journey, where one piece of reading led to another. Sometimes, he veered off course and meandered through an unexpected text. Other times, one book simply peaked his curiosity in another author or pushed him to explore a topic further; one book taught him something and directed him to learn more. Roth beautifully exemplifies how books are magical landscapes for the inquisitive mind.
P.R. I seem to have veered off course lately and read a heterogeneous collection of books. I’ve read three books by Ta-Nehisi Coates, the most telling from a literary point of view, “The Beautiful Struggle,” his memoir of the boyhood challenge from his father. From reading Coates I learned about Nell Irvin Painter’s provocatively titled compendium “The History of White People.” Painter sent me back to American history, to Edmund Morgan’s “American Slavery, American Freedom,” a big scholarly history of what Morgan calls “the marriage of slavery and freedom” as it existed in early Virginia. Reading Morgan led me circuitously to reading the essays of Teju Cole, though not before my making a major swerve by reading Stephen Greenblatt’s “The Swerve,” about the circumstances of the 15th-century discovery of the manuscript of Lucretius’ subversive “On the Nature of Things.” This led to my tackling some of Lucretius’ long poem, written sometime in the first century B.C.E., in a prose translation by A. E. Stallings. From there I went on to read Greenblatt’s book about “how Shakespeare became Shakespeare,” “Will in the World.” How in the midst of all this I came to read and enjoy Bruce Springsteen’s autobiography, “Born to Run,” I can’t explain other than to say that part of the pleasure of now having so much time at my disposal to read whatever comes my way invites unpremeditated surprises.
Looking back on my reading list, anyone could discern that I have a penchant for female writers, memoir, and poetry. One would know that I became a parent, knew grief and often sought the company of those who write and garden and prepare food. The list includes periods of time when I sought inspiration or explored gratitude or deeply reflected on nature along with those who formally and informally study its workings. No one could say I only read the latest novels to top the bestseller lists in any given year, but one would know that I dabbled in serious works of fiction along with those much lighter in essence, particularly in the summer. I am grateful for this archive, a reminder of how one's life in the world intertwines with one's life of the mind.
One of the first books I remember owning was a hard back picture book compilation of Grimms' Fairy Tales, including Rapunzel, Rumpelstiltskin, The Goose Girl, and Jorinde and Joringel that I received from my aunt at Christmas. I was in elementary school and certainly read other books I owned or borrowed regularly from the library, but this book remains with me to this very day as the first log in my memory's reading list. I can still see some of the illustrations very clearly in my mind and remember poring over it repeatedly. Here began my journey as an independent reader which has led over the years to the book I just finished last night, Hourglass by Dani Shapiro. So many books in between are forgotten, particularly before I began my formal reading journal, but the magical journey continues just the same: one book at a time read with great pleasure.
