so many books, so little time

Steve Edwards:

I’d started coming to bookstores because I wanted to learn how to write and the only consistent advice I got from established writers was to read everything. It was good advice. It’s still good advice. It’s also impossible. No one reads everything, nor even all the books they’d like to. You make your choices, come what may.

Harvard economist Alexander Gerschenkron once calculated that if one reads two books a week over the course of an adult life (from roughly age 20-70), the final tally will be about 5,000. I’d never suffered from FOMO until I read that. No actuarial life table ever hit me so hard. After my yearly physical this week, there was a brief 48-hour window where my doctor was investigating the possibility of me having an aortic aneurysm, but even the wait for the ultrasound results didn’t bring with it the cold touch of the grave like that unforgiving numeral sitting there, marking the end of all potential. Today I counted the total number of books on my shelves (1500 exactly) and it was like watching sand falling in a hourglass. “Oh, my greed is a flame! Oh, that I might be reborn in a hundred beings!”

Patrick Kurp:

Read the first OED definition of desultory and see how it mutates: “Skipping about, jumping or flitting from one thing to another; irregularly shifting, devious; wavering, unsteady.” A butterfly flits, purposefully. Watch one moving from flower to flower, probing for nectar. Butterflies have evolved a proboscis resembling a coiled, retractable straw. Their flitting is methodical, not superficial.

Flitting among books is what some of us do every day. Sometimes the flitting is pragmatic – consulting a dictionary or other reference work. More often, we have several books going simultaneously, and one book inevitably leads to others.

For a long time, especially when I bought books at retail prices, I prided myself on doggedly finishing every book I started and never owning more than a couple unread books at a time. Parsimony was my guiding principle. I chose carefully which books to buy and ran my eyes over every inch of text between the covers. Once online shopping came around, I was exposed to a lot more suggestive algorithmic whispers from the shadowed alleyways of Amazon, but I stuck to the straight and frugal path, buying used-good as often as possible, usually after letting a book dwell in wish-list purgatory for a while to make sure I really wanted it. Nowadays, money isn’t quite so tight and I haunt library sales dozens of times a year, so I find myself willing to take a chance on a three-dollar-or-less book which might not have interested me in the abstract. Correspondingly, I’ve become a bit more willing to flit away from an uninteresting book rather than plod through like a tortoise, though I still feel slightly guilty about doing so. That Protestant book ethic is difficult to shake off.

Here’s the group of hitchhikers I picked up last weekend. I may have already read the Wodehouse stories, but since I don’t know of any convenient compilations of his plentiful works, I just grab whatever I find. I had the Lasch book on my wish list once, but it never graduated to a purchase. Epicurus, Horace and Erasmus sounds like one of those “ideal dinner party” scenarios. And I’m delighted to see the unjustly-maligned season of winter being honored with a sympathetic biography:

Tom Gerken:

While the two words may have similar meanings, there is one key difference: Bibliomania describes the intention to create a book collection, tsundoku describes the intention to read books and their eventual, accidental collection.

I used to fret over my increasing inability to achieve “bookshelf zero”, but I’m slowly resigning myself to the fact that having forty to fifty books in the “want to read” column is just becoming my new baseline, given my constant exposure to temptation. A friend recently said she prefers having unread books lying around because of the potential they represent. Likewise, I’d rather maintain the feeling of childlike excitement in finding a new book I want to read, even if it keeps me chained to my Sisyphean task.

Yet at no point did Jefferson’s financial plight slow his spendthrift ways. Faithfully, almost obsessively, he kept recording every purchase and expenditure, but it was as if somehow he could never bring himself to add up the columns. At home, in his voluminous farm records, he never in his life added up the profit and loss for any year, and perhaps for the reason that there was almost never any profit.

…Paris booksellers soon found they had an American patron like no other. In the bookshops and stalls along the Seine were volumes in numbers and variety such as Jefferson had never seen, and his pleasure was boundless. To Madison he would describe the surpassing pleasure of “examining all the principal bookstores, turning over every book with my own hand and putting by everything related to America, and indeed whatever was rare and valuable to every science.” There were weeks when he was buying books every day. In his first month in Paris, he could not buy them fast enough, and ran up bills totaling nearly 800 francs. Nor was the book-buying spree to end. The grand total of books he acquired in France was about 2,000, but he also bought books by the boxful for Washington, Franklin and James Madison.

— David McCullough, John Adams

That image of Jefferson trying so hard to balance his books, only to lose heart right at the final tally, struck me as endearingly poignant. Good thing he didn’t have Amazon.com to tempt him. Who knows how many modern Jeffersons have been diverted from what could have been a glorious political destiny into a pitiful existence as lonely book hoarders?

In the household budget, I keep a fraction of a percent of the quarterly gross revenues for my own selfish hedonistic pleasure, which invariably means buying books. Last week, as I began planning which books to buy with the first quarter’s allotment, I was struck by a strange, lethargic sadness. I had whittled my wish list down to about nine or ten books after the holidays, but then I discovered a rich vein of intellectual ore that I wanted to mine, which led to another twenty or so being added during the last couple of months. Suddenly, it all seemed futile. So much still to be read, and more coming all the time! I can barely make a dent in it with this paltry amount of money! What’s the use? Why suffer the torments of Tantalus over books I’ll never have time or money for? Why not just resign myself to checking out romance novels from the library from now on?

Thankfully, the spell of madness didn’t last long. And thanks to a budget review, a little extra money was trimmed from other line items to be allocated toward monthly book purchases. I wish I could reach back in time to put a consoling arm around Jefferson’s shoulder and encourage him to face that bottom line without flinching. The only way out is straight on through, Tommy, old buddy. A little austerity up front makes the pleasure so much sweeter afterward.

Well, I fell short of my stated goal from this summer by one and a half books. Still, I applaud my effort. Now, my Sisyphean task resumes with another stack. And like Camus (the subject of “A Life Worth Living”, in the middle row) said, one must imagine Sisyphus happy. Yes, yes, I am.