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fifty-two
When I finished reading Louis Jenkins' The Water's Easy Reach, I officially completed the fifty-second book I've read this year, which means that, on average, I've read at least a book a week. The full list lives here.
I've never before managed to maintain a reading log for more than a couple of months at a time (a spotty attempt from 2001 lives here and a second one here). Now that I've got one that covers a whole year, I'm thinking about analyzing it for trends... all part of the bigger project of trying to figure out exactly what it is that I like. In December or January I'll do some crunching on the data-set of the year's list and I'll post the results here.
What my number-crunching won't reveal is whether fifty-two is above or below my normal yearly average. It's probably above—not only because a fair number of books on this list are fairly slight poetry chapbooks, but also because the very knowledge that I was maintaining a list made me oddly conscious of the half-finished books lying around my apartment at any given moment. Knowing that I could add a book to "the list" if I completed it sometimes gave me the extra incentive to finish that book rather than starting a new one.
That's not to say that I finished everything I started reading this year. The following are some books that I read beyond the first page, but didn't complete. I have ordered this list according to snarkiness:
Shamanism : Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy by Marcus Eliade
Amount completed: approximately 20 pages
Reason for quitting: this book is probably the text on shamanism, but it's not really very friendly to a general audience. There's 600-plus pages of hard-core data here: more than I need. (I may yet read Daniel Pinchbeck's Breaking Open the Head, though.)
The Druid Source Book edited by John Matthews
Amount completed: one article
Reason for quitting: Pretty much same as above. Druidism is interesting, and the book is probably great for some people, but I'm too much of a neophyte to be particularly gripped by debates about which particular trees Irish druids venerated.
John Cage : Writer edited by Richard Kostelanetz
Amount completed: probably 90 percent
Reason for quitting: I read everything that was interesting, which was most of the book. I skipped some of the drier journalistic reviews and some of the more technical articles. I would also have skipped the mesotics if there were any... I love Cage but have never found his mesotic writings to be even a little bit interesting.
Glamorama by Bret Easton Ellis
Amount completed: maybe sixty pages
Reason for quitting: Every once in a while, I start to believe the Bret Easton Ellis hype. Maybe he is a great satirist, I think, and I'm just missing something... then I read something he wrote and am disabused of that notion for another several years. This book has one joke: celebrities, models, and trendsetters are shallow. This is the kind of satire that could only seem "cutting" to people who work for Conde Nast.
Finite and Infinite Games by James Carse
Amount completed: forty pages; skimmed the rest with mounting horror
Reason for quitting: This is an absolutely dreadful book, inexplicably admired by lots of people with otherwise good taste. Following the pattern of self-help literature, this book makes up a new jargon through which to interpret (read: over-simplify) the world. Like many other pseudo-philosophies, this one seems momentarily like it might just explain everything, only to utterly detonate upon the slightest contact with the real world that we have to live in. Labels: book_commentary |
