The list: some background

Throughout most of high school, in a peculiar rebellion against what I considered the wasted hours spent at school doing busywork, I read a book every day. Hungry to understand the world and be understood, I read my way from Jane Eyre to Thus Spake Zarathustra, from A Passage to India to Soul on Ice, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings to Dubliners to 1984 to my aunt's collection of paperback romances. I read Kingsolver and Huxley and Dostoevsky and Kant and Crichton and Confucius and Austen and Dumas and Thoreau and Hemingway and Achebe. I read the complete works of Shakespeare, Star Trek novels, my parents' college textbooks, mysteries, and pretty much anything else that crossed my path. I didn't sleep much, and I got pretty arrogant. 

I also kept a list (to prove how clever and accomplished I was). I was strict about what titles could be added: only books I read for the first time (re-readings, or readings of updated editions, did not count), and then only if I finished them completely, cover to cover. If I read a classic novel but skipped the scholarly introduction, did it count? I would write it down, but it felt like cheating.

In college, however, I was forced to slow down. I had to process and respond to the reading I did for classes. I began to recognize the merits of quality over quantity, and had less time to read outside of coursework. Gradually I stopped updating the list. After a year or two, I tossed the sheaf of papers into a recycling bin, embarrassed by this physical reminder of my teenage smugness. More time passed. I graduated and took a job in a library, reveling in the book-filled surroundings, surreptitiously reading the occasional passage as I checked in returns or cataloged a stack of new publications. I resigned myself to the fact that, even were I to return to the old book-per-day habit, the total number of books I could ever hope to read in a lifetime comprised just a tiny fraction of the wealth of information that surrounded me. 

Curious about how many books I was still getting through, I started keeping a list again in June 2008. The current total stands at 225, a respectable average of 5 per month. It has been satisfying to watch the tally grow -- but perhaps a little too satisfying. 

Lest I fall again into the trap of reading for numbers instead of for knowledge, this blog will be an attempt to do something with the list, to engage more fully with what I read (past and present) instead of merely drifting from story to story, observing and passing along without considering whatever thoughts each book has to offer, or how the experience of reading has affected me.