Ten years ago, I calculated that if I could read a book a week, I would need thirty years to read all the books in my library. And when I thought about how long it actually takes me to read one, I realised how absurd the situation was. I already had more books than I could possibly read in the rest of my life, and I was still buying more.
What did I want them all for?
I brought most of them to Greece with me, thinking that it would be difficult and expensive to get them here. I sold or traded in the ones I didn’t want any more, and bought a lot of others that I thought I’d want or need here. In some cases it was a bit of a gamble; some of the books ended up not interesting me enough.
(I once contacted an acquaintance from a Toronto, a novelist and poet, and he mentioned in his email that he had once been browsing in a used bookstore and had found all the books of his that he’d inscribed to me. I had a bit of explaining to do.)
When I came to Greece I started working full time, and the number of books I read declined. I didn’t have as much time, and when I did, I didn’t have as much energy. Over the past year, I’ve been horrified to find myself drowsing after I start reading. My eyes close and my mind wanders. I’m awake, but my eyes are closed and I’m holding a book in front of my face. I have become something which a few years ago I would have mocked.
I should start getting rid of my books, I tell myself. I look at their spines and I think I hear them laughing at me. “You think you can write one of us?” they say. “You can barely read one of us!”
When we leaving Athens to come to Crete, I got rid of a few hundred of them, to make the move a little bit easier, and because we had agreed that they would stay in one room, here in my office.
(This was taken shortly after I filled the shelves. There are others, too.)
It was difficult, almost painful, getting rid of the ones I gave away to friend, and I know I didn’t give away enough. N. says I should put shelves up on the wall across from these two bookcases, but I don’t know.
And yet, I still want to read. I feel restless if I’m not reading something. I dip into them a lot, and sometimes read several books at the same time. This invariably means I won’t finish any of them. I cannot sleep at night if I don’t open a book and read at least a paragraph. I’ve even come home late at night, so drunk I can’t walk straight, and still tried to read a bit before I turned out the light. It feels like an act of self-assertion: one last attempt, after all the demands that were made on me that day, to claim my time as my own.
So why is it so hard for me to stay interested in a book? What has happened to me that I fail to enjoy all that I know a book offers me, that I fail to enjoy what I so much want to enjoy?
It’s not laziness, because when I look back at the books that I’ve enjoyed most over the past few years, I see that they have all been relatively challenging — not escapist stuff. They are books I found compelling and something of whose composition remained a mystery to me. I read all the Coetzee I could find and grappled with the question of how he achieved his complexity. Sebald was a revelation, and yet an impenetrable mystery. I loved DeLillo’s Underworld, and White Noise and The Faces, although I soon went off him completely. Roth’s American Pastoral was gripping, but when I finished The Human Stain, I’d had enough. Vollmann’s Europe Central. Chatwin. Herzog. All of which had some sort of authority of voice, which I wanted to master.
Part of my problem is impatience. Anna Karenina was one of the best examples of what I want in a book, but at some point I put it down too. I think its length daunts me: in the amount of time it would take me to finish it, I could read two or three of the other books that call out to me, and which in the end I don’t read either. I want that satisfying feeling of finishing a book — a feeling so enjoyable that I always feel I have to start immediately on another. I want to swallow the book, and often don’t have the patience to chew through it page by page.
Is it the feeling that so few books seem to live up to their promise? I don’t want to impute to books my own shortcomings as a reader. I know not to expect from a book something it can’t give me.
I keep buying books, although I buy almost as few as I manage to read. I have learned to resist the temptation. I don’t buy books if I feel they belong to a type that’s already well enough represented in my library. I bought Josipovici because I knew the two books I ordered were unlike any other I had. Next I will buy Pessoa’s Book of Disquiet. I’ve been thinking of making a separate shelf for all the strange authors whose work sets them apart for me somehow: Zweig, Bernhard, Kadare, Gombrowicz, Svevo.
I have been putting off buying the Pessoa as I had put off buying the Josipovici books. It had ceased to be a desire and become a necessity. I bought them to rid myself of the nagging desire to get them.
I don’t know how to answer the questions I’ve raised here. Please comment, and share your thoughts, insights and experiences.
I never bother with reading any more. Nonfiction sometimes, but I rarely get far. Fiction never. I have not picked up a novel since I went to China. When was that? Long enough ago that I’m not sure when. Before that, I had not read a novel for maybe a year. I think that was Ellroy, Silent Terror, but I’m not sure. I doubt I’ll bother again.
The odds are against you statistically when finishing a book; a lot of people don’t for whatever reason. I almost didn’t finish the last non-fiction book I read because its interesting beginning and middle had developed into a limp and whimpering end, but I forced myself and it wasn’t worth it. I gave up fiction a long time ago.
Like you, I left books behind in my homeland, but they’re in a storage area along with some other things with the hopes of being saved for a library I want to build someday. But unlike you, many of these books belonged to my mother and I won’t sell them off. My brother already did that to the ones I didn’t manage to take before her death.
Reading before you go to bed I understand is not the best thing one can do to relax, though I see many do it. And as life becomes filled with more interesting things, perhaps the written word becomes more of an indulgence than necessity. Maybe it’s that part of you that wants to hold on and persists, even if it’s an exercise in futility. After all, books are beautiful, who wants to put them down?
But for me it still feels like a necessity. I feel uneasy and dissatisfied if I’m not reading. That’s the weird thing. Both of you, Kat and Zen, seem to have lost interest in reading, at least fiction. (I’ve noticed this in a few editors, Zen.) But I haven’t. I want to read very much. Something has happened to my ability.
Of all the things to give up on, fiction has never, ever crossed my mind.
I understand that books are talismans against the evil spirits. The more you have the safer you feel (you are actually safer too)… You don’t have to read them… It took me some time but I got it…
I have my books,
a fortress deep and mighty
that none may penetrate…
(Paul Simon)
Perhaps “gave up” is not the right way to express what I meant since I was never interested in fiction and simply tolerated it as required reading for literature classes. It’s a worthy and enlightening endeavor to read the classics, however I’m more interested in real life stories and documentaries. This also explains my lifelong disinterest in movies, which I see as escapist. I realize I’m in the minority, as nearly 99 percent of people I know disagree with my views.
I like books because I so worship the written word and love holding paper in my hands. Like you, I read more than one concurrently; I’ve just become very selective about how I spend my time.
I value books, like distant friends, the more for seeing them less. Now we should never try to own friends (although possessing lovers is another matter) so I borrow my best friends in library editions. Even the most seductive title is put back on the shelf of whatever town immediately before I fly out. And even the smallest village affords the visitor a library – even if it is a private one with friendship the only membership card.
For me most personal libraries are monuments to wastage because their contents are so obviously neglected: the paperbacks’ spines are uncreased, and the gilding on the hardbacks is obscured by ornaments placed in front. I shiver – it is as if I am in a nunnery of exquisite novices who have never been touched and are never likely to be. Such libraries resemble the pre-Socratic universe: a confused mixture of particles to which their owners attribute the formation of a universe.
Now, as for the working library which substitutes availability for ownership as its determining principle (although the latter may assist the former), that I admire: the library where books are hanging off one another over the edge of the desk, the library that understands momentum rather than stasis. I guess most writers’ libraries are like this; if so, those libraries are privileged: for most people books are like bric-a-brac.
I share your concern about selling presentation copies because some minds I admire claim that possessions only have value when they are gifted – in other words, when they become the vehicles of love rather than the cages of desire.
Ascetic by temperament, I regard most possessions as inhibitors rather than liberators. Before I make any decision (whether it is to accept an invitation, purchase an item etc) I ask: does this increase my freedom? Not the adolescent version, which is license without responsibility, but freedom as engagement with the world such that my future options are increased rather than diminished. Because consumerism and individualism are opposed rather than complimentary, the answer with possessions (including books) is almost always ‘No’. I don’t want to define myself by external goods rather than internal Good.
Thanks for contributing, David. Your last paragraph reminded me of something I heard in a film once, and which was imprinted in my mind:
Death is the sum of all it takes from you.
Great post. I love reading as well. I average 1-1 1/2 books per week. Not easy with the kid and all but I always manage to find the time, especially if it’s a good one. Like you I brought most of my books from the states and have continued accumulating here for the last 4 years. Now that I’ve got to empty my library (it will be the new baby’s room) I’ve started an excel sheet to keep track of what I have and I’m putting the books in boxes in storage. I thought about donating them but where? Such a shame…
Too many books. Not enough time to read them. Can’t stop buying them. Sounds like the story of my life.
My new year’s resolution is to buy no books in 2008. I’ll just read what I have.
Yeah, right! Good luck with that one . . .
But for me it still feels like a necessity. I feel uneasy and dissatisfied if I’m not reading. That’s the weird thing.
What are you seeking when you read, Thomas? What lack or impairment are you hoping to address? What is this latest book going to do for you that all the previous books did not?
If you impartially observe and honestly examine your impulses as you begin to feel such uneasiness and dissatisfaction (rather than suppressing or deferring them by picking up a book), you may gain some insight into what exactly you’ve been using books for, and perhaps an understanding of why you’ve built up a tolerance that dilutes the effects you once could count on.
Simone, are you asking because you think you know the answer?
I enjoy reading, and resent the forces in my life that take time and energy away from this. It’s important to me, and when I do read a good book, I still get the feeling that I’m adding to a treasury I’ve been holding all these years.
The real question, I think, is why I find myself so often unable to read.
Perhaps it’s because of the frustration I so often associate with it.
Tom, you may have answered your own question. You want to read, but you can’t because you’re distracted by “the forces” in your life that take away your time and energy.
When you were younger, living at home and going to school, you had few responsibilities and lots of time. You were free to read and think. Now you’re an adult. You’re newly married and pursuing a career. You have adult responsibilities that prevent you from reading.
Reading is, after all, a purely selfish pleasure. When you try to read now, you may be thinking in the back of your mind, “I should be doing something else. Something more important.” So you can’t concentrate on the book.
I have the same problem. I bet lots of other adults with crowded work and family schedules do too.
I can suggest only one solution. Schedule time for reading. Stick to the schedule. Read only quality books because reading time is short and precious. And don’t feel guilty (if “guilty” is the right word) about reading them.
Frankie the C,
Perhaps you’re right about the anxiety or guilt.
I started thinking about these things after I read a couple of reviews for a book whose title I can’t remember now, about the huge number of books being published, and how it’s impossible to keep up even remotely. I’ll look for it, but what stuck out in my mind was the phrase, “Reading is a luxury of the poor.”
But I’m poor, damn it!
I saw so much of myself in your post here, Thomas. !
Thomas, you recalled a film where (a film is a place?) one character asserts ‘Death is the sum of all it takes from you….’
In Louis Sebastian-Mercier’s 1771 novel ‘L’an deux mille quatre cent quarante, reve s’il en fut jamais’ (‘The year 2440: a dream if ever there was one’), two characters discuss authorship, reading and death:
– ‘What, everyone an author! Heavens, what an idea! Your walls will burst into flames like gunpowder, and everything will explode. Good God! A whole population of authors!’
– ‘Yes, but without gall, without pride or presumption. Every man writes what he thinks in his better moments and, as he grows older, he draws together a collection of the finest recollections of his lifetime. Before his death he compiles a book, which is larger or smaller according to his own way of seeing and expressing himself. This book is the soul of the departed. It is read aloud on the day of his funeral, and this reading alone constitutes his eulogy. Children collect, with great respect, all the thoughts of their forebears and meditate upon them. These are our funeral urns. I think they’re preferable to your sumptuous mausoleums or your tombs with their distasteful inscriptions dictated by pride and engraved by vulgarity.’
Most of us have so many more books than we will ever get to read, and yet, as booklovers do, we buy more. I had to leave quite a few books behind myself, I guess I kept 60%, gave away quite many. Haven’t missed any of them, and I realise I should have gotten rid of many more. Yet I buy books every week although I rarely read. I haven’t got the patience, most books simply bore me. Still, a library is like a circle of friends. Always there for you. You just need to choose your friends carefully.
Thomas,
Your feelings – that I well recognize – are those of modern melancholy which is our answer to a world of too much that is going too fast. It is a world in which we have to deal with both the frustrations of Tantalus and Narcissus.
To stay to books: in our western consumer society we are plunged in a giant bookstore in which billions of voices, sounds and thoughts draw our attention. As receptive and thinking beings, as intellectuals who are supposed to purchase truth or hapiness or insight or enlightenment (or just recognition), we sometimes want (hope?) to find them in every page that looks well written. Making choices is our fate and there is no other way unless we want to return to bookstores with one or five ‘holy’ books on one shelf. Accepting that we are just limited beings (readers, thinkers, etc.) and enjoying the moments of reading that give us (in a whole book or in just one phrase) what we might be looking for, is what I try to do. And writing: that is adding our own book to the ocean. And finding soul brothers and sisters in books, on blogs or in real life …
I used to read more, when I was unemployed. I used to read up to 30, sometimes 40 cm of thoughts a week, quite a pile of books…
Someone once told me that every book was the inside of someone’s head, and I wanted to know people. It didn’t really matter who they were as long as I could be the voyeur in a dark corner, or the child, peaking through the curtains at gory scenes of elevated shamelessness and eloquent tracts of misguided chivalry and worship.
That phase has passed.
I now read the book which is my life and every character I meet gets a paragraph, although I seem to revert, more and more, to oneliners. I am the reader and the writer now, you see, and the book is read and written as if every page could be the last. I try to bond with the subjects in it but they won’t let me, because I have the eery ability to predict their next move. Some have told me that, under my gaze, they feel exposed, naked beyond naked…
I rarely look people in the eye anymore.
Have I escaped reality, or have I fled?
I still buy books and enjoy reading, but I let the books choose me, and, once read, I give them to someone on a whim, be it a waitress, an infant or a beggar.
Somehow the idea has settled that a book unread, on a shelf in a private library, is like a musical instrument unplayed, a waste and a shame.
Silenced.
There was talk about consumerism opposed to individuality. Is not individuality the right and ability to choose WHAT to consume, rather than opting NOT to consume?
Is it not desireable to recycle a product, once cosumed?
I acquired the belief that it is decadent and rude to put more on your plate than you can eat.
Might you have a luxury problem?
It’s been a while since I’ve shared my thoughts, and I seldom do so in writing, but I have enjoyed it, as I enjoyed reading your ‘blog’ (what an ugly word, don’t you agree?) and some of the comments.
Be literary well.