Looking Good
The eagerness to end my reading sabbatical was matched only by the pursuit of my first book in some three months. The majority of my student teaching tenure found me far too preoccupied to give any attention to my most beloved of pastimes. It was with envy that I watched my roommate triumph over one book after another while my library sat in a terrible purgatory, none knowing whether they would ever be explored. As my final week of teaching began, I quickly noticed my workload plummeting and I promptly sat myself down before the towering shelves of possibilities and began the most tortuous process: choosing my next book.
I took a lot of pride in my 2009 reading list. I had plowed through a number of tomes that were finally more than just impressive showpieces and I had thoroughly enjoyed most of what I had read that year. And really, 2008 wasn’t bad either. So 2010 then was bound to be another great year. But it wasn’t.
There were two main problems with my reading list for 2010. First of all, I started school again, so I was distracted with school work for much of the year, which slowed me down. But this created a second problem in that I was disinclined to read a thick, ambitious book. Now, while I may have a plethora of short, fantastic reads, my book radar was seriously on the fritz for much of 2010. I began trudging through a depressing maze of mediocrity, forcing myself to endure books that were less than pleasurable solely because of the great dishonor and embarrassment that is the unfinished book. There are already a rough dozen or so such books that continually mock me from beneath the telling layer of dust. Like I said, coming off a bumper year in 2009, I had no hint of what lay in store. 2010 began so pleasantly with the utterly tickling Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. But then I stumbled into a couple politically-heated manifestos that seemed like such good ideas at first. Not to say I gained nothing from them, but the pleasure of reading was markedly absent. By summer I had made a couple wiser choices, but then I stumbled again into mediocrity.
Maybe I should pause before I get too melodramatic about my 2010 reading list. I read a number of great books that year. And really, the lousy books that I keep bemoaning were by far in the minority. But there is this problem: I kept comparing everything to that choice year of 2009 when I really had a roughly 90% success rate with my book choices. There was only one book I really disliked and there were a couple I was underwhelmed with, but overall, it was a stellar year. For 2010, however, my success rate fell to around 75%. And it wasn’t just that my success rate had fallen, but that my pace had slowed as well. Having put away some 18 books (many fitting the “tome” category) in 2009, the following year reaped a mere 12, and those much more petite. So 2010 was really only a dismal year because of a few bad apples and for the constant comparison to the bountiful predecessor. Before 2010 was out, I did manage to squeeze in a few more great reads, but there remained at least four books I was less than pleased with, two of which I actually wished I hadn’t read. I never feel that way.
So with this mediocre year of reading behind me, I started January of 2011 with a prime choice: The Worst Hard Time, a riveting and emotional read about the tragedy of the Dust Bowl. But upon finishing it, I found a sabbatical would be necessary, because my student teaching obligations were consuming my free time. So for some ten weeks my bookshelves provided little more pleasure than window shopping. Then, as my obligations began to fall away, I jumped at the chance and picked out an ambitious but feasible history of the fall of Berlin in 1945. In ten short days, it had been surmounted and returned to the shelf. And so, after the sad ten week sabbatical, I was finally back on track. I may or may not get in 18 books like I did in 2009, but I’m certainly going to try. I could cheat and plow through my assortment of short paperbacks, but there’s hardly the satisfaction there that one finds in a 500-page book of history.
So it might seem now that it’s all coming up roses, and maybe it is, but there is a certain agonizing thorn: the process of picking the next book. After finishing my latest book at midnight, I then proceeded to spend fifty (50, five-zero) minutes trying to select my next pursuit. Short, long, history, memoir, novel, it’s all so hard. The writer PJ O’Rourke once suggested that it’s always good to read something that, should you die in the middle of it, will make you look good. That may not be so much the driving force for my reading habits, but I certainly do host a certain fear that I might pick up a book that I don’t like and then not finish it. And when I choose a book, I always want to read the absolute best book that I have, as though this may be the last book I ever read. It’s clearly not just a pastime, but a dramatic experience of life and death.
