april foolishness
Perhaps this is a fool's errand, but I've made a vow: not to buy any new books this month. Nor next month, perhaps--no new books until I finish reading all the books I own, or give away any I can't muster up the willpower to face. The husband of one of my mentors joked, after another seismic event in earthquake-prone Seattle, that she'd be remembered for 'dying beneath all the books she never read' were the shelves of her narrow office to collapse upon her. It's time for me to prevent a similar fate.
If I can hold myself to it--and avoid the temptation of re-reading (one reason I own so many books I haven't read is that I have many I've read five, ten, even twenty times)--it will be a very instructional month. I don't have many unread novels, since I don't tend to buy fiction without having read it already, or without the intention to do so immediately. I'm now immersed in Vikram Chandra's Sacred Games, but after its formidable length is exhausted, there will only be Chronicle of a Death Foretold, picked up from a stoop recently, and Mahfouz's The Beginning and the End. And then, we're on to fare like Kosovo: A Short History; Adventures in Marxism*; Growing Up Gay/Growing Up Lesbian: A Literary Anthology; Ethnic Conflict and Civic Life: Hindus and Muslims in India; Violence and the State in Suharto's Indonesia; Policy Perspectives on Islam and Tolerance in a Wider Europe; and Edge of Empire: Lives, Culture, and Conquest in the East, 1750-1850. I'm quite keen on that last one, actually. And I've just been given a book of travel accounts of Byzantium/Constantinople/İstanbul through the ages, which I'll have to ration with care.
I haven't yet decided whether to include books I have read in part (in which case, toss in The Veil and the Male Elite; Containing Nationalism; and Dinarzad's Children: An Anthology of Contemporary Arab-American Fiction, among others), or books in non-English languages: is it time to finally make my way through Benim adım Kırmızı (better known to you lot as My Name is Red), and 'Ne Mutlu Türküm Diyebiline': Türk Ulusal Kimliğinin Etno-Seküler Sınırları ('Happy is he who can say, I am a Turk': The Ethno-Secular Limits of Turkish National Identity)?
Yes, I think rereading fiction is definitely going to have to be allowed.
*I should mention here that I had the pleasure of encountering Marshall Berman this week, and what joy! it gave me to discover that he bears a noticeable resemblance to Karl Marx, at least in terms of coiffure.
If I can hold myself to it--and avoid the temptation of re-reading (one reason I own so many books I haven't read is that I have many I've read five, ten, even twenty times)--it will be a very instructional month. I don't have many unread novels, since I don't tend to buy fiction without having read it already, or without the intention to do so immediately. I'm now immersed in Vikram Chandra's Sacred Games, but after its formidable length is exhausted, there will only be Chronicle of a Death Foretold, picked up from a stoop recently, and Mahfouz's The Beginning and the End. And then, we're on to fare like Kosovo: A Short History; Adventures in Marxism*; Growing Up Gay/Growing Up Lesbian: A Literary Anthology; Ethnic Conflict and Civic Life: Hindus and Muslims in India; Violence and the State in Suharto's Indonesia; Policy Perspectives on Islam and Tolerance in a Wider Europe; and Edge of Empire: Lives, Culture, and Conquest in the East, 1750-1850. I'm quite keen on that last one, actually. And I've just been given a book of travel accounts of Byzantium/Constantinople/İstanbul through the ages, which I'll have to ration with care.
I haven't yet decided whether to include books I have read in part (in which case, toss in The Veil and the Male Elite; Containing Nationalism; and Dinarzad's Children: An Anthology of Contemporary Arab-American Fiction, among others), or books in non-English languages: is it time to finally make my way through Benim adım Kırmızı (better known to you lot as My Name is Red), and 'Ne Mutlu Türküm Diyebiline': Türk Ulusal Kimliğinin Etno-Seküler Sınırları ('Happy is he who can say, I am a Turk': The Ethno-Secular Limits of Turkish National Identity)?
Yes, I think rereading fiction is definitely going to have to be allowed.
*I should mention here that I had the pleasure of encountering Marshall Berman this week, and what joy! it gave me to discover that he bears a noticeable resemblance to Karl Marx, at least in terms of coiffure.
posted by kitabet at 4:33 PM
5 Comments:
Marcus Aurelius says one shouldn't read so much.
Which, considering I was reading his writings nineteen-hundred years after his death, seemed to me a rather ungrateful thing to say.
But that doesn't mean he isn't right.
I'd like to go a whole year without reading!
tell me if you succeed then i'll follow your lead as i am currently losing the battle of the books.
Teju,
Marcus Aurelius said many wise things, but on this count, I will part ways. A year without reading? I'd have to be a much saner, happier person before I could contemplate the possibility with anything less than terror. (If this is my crutch, so be it: it's easier on the liver than others.)
After all, I picked up all these books in the first place because they are full of things I want to learn. And this exercise is intended, in part, to make my reading more mindful--a symptom of my recent distress is so many hours spent in mindless, agitated clicking round the damned internet: reading without focus, without desire or reward (save for a few rare sites, yours among them). It feels good to sit within the covers of a book, instead.
But I promise this: to read them slowly.
dear lyra: the key to success will be staying out of the Strand! Heed my example in that.
One should be wary - al-Jahiz suffered the fate of being crushed by books.
e.,
i know i should be banned.
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