Maybe blogging more than any would want to read, best
defines what I want to do:
1. A blog about books
2. In a medium whose users are indifferent to books
3. In a world where books have become increasingly irrelevant
4. By a writer who is unknown to the world of blog readers
5. A writer who senses no one cares about his tastes,
fancies, insights, humor, but who simply can’t stop himself
Am I making a case for no one to read this?
But if someone is reading it, he or she must either care a
bit or are curious. Perhaps I’ll blindly wander into a world of book readers
who can share and appreciate my obsessive reading experience.
How to define this obsession? That’s one of the threads of
this blogging venture. I will examine the many symptoms of a drive or appetite
to read as many books as I can, starting around age ten. Could I have been naïve
enough to have thought I could read everything? Did I know or anticipate the
enormous amount of literature out there? I was satisfied, if not confident,
that my tastes were wide enough to include many genres in fiction and large
quantity of nonfiction, especially historical books.
A character in Jean-Paul Sartre’s novel, Nausea, Ogier P., an autodidact, is
reading all the books in the local library alphabetically. The project seems
both admirable and pathetic. No, I don’t think I could be so systematic, as my
reading habits will prove, but the scale of my reading mirrors Ogier’s project.
Evidence of my progressive desire to read everything is the
increasing number of books that I own and have not read (or only partially
read). This inclination started early, in my teens, as I found great pleasure
on buying books. I belonged to the Book-of-the-Month Club and the Literary
Guild during my sophomore year in high school. In my thirties, as I started a
career as a History teacher, I joined the History Book Club. These started my
book surplus, as initial enthusiasms for many works (the Eastern Roman Empire,
the Goths, archaeology) often died before I even started them. Because I found
other books more interesting and promised myself I would eventually get to the
increasing number of dust-gathering hardbacks.
The book overpopulation took off exponentially once I
accessed second-hand book stores. Starting in college, most of the books I
bought cost a fraction of the retail price. Forty-years of second hand books
made worse with the creation of Amazon. I had access virtually to any book ever
written. And, like the search for books in New York City and Philadelphia, I reveled
in tracking down many remote books.
But the ultimate testament to my obsession is the presence
in my bookcases of several thousand-page books or books that are almost or feel
like a thousand pages. All the books have been started but, due to age and
distractions, I gave up after reading, at most, ten to fifteen present of them.
Not that I don’t have a successful history of reading very
long books. In high school, at age fifteen, I read William L. Shirer’s The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich. It
took two weeks, reading eighty to ninety pages a day. Then there was Irving Wallace’s The Plot. I remember a blurb on the nine
hundred-page paperback: “Only a shortage of paper will prevent this book from
being a bestseller.” In my thirties, I read the nearly thousand pages of Don Quixote.
Trouble began with the eight hundred-page Gravity’s Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon. I
had read V. and The Crying of Lot 49. And I motored through the early pages of his
magnum opus. But around page four hundred I bogged down, I told myself I would
get back to it. I did but didn’t get much further. But this didn’t prevent me from
buying Mason & Dixon. Nearly
eight hundred pages. I haven’t even started it after ten years.
The latter book reminded of two John Barth novels I couldn’t
finish: The Sot-Weed Factor and Giles Goat Boy (I couldn’t get very far
in his very long Letters). The first
Barth book anticipated Mason & Dixon;
the second intrigued me for its alleged satire of campus life at Penn State
University, where I earned a Bachelor of Arts in English, the same department
where Barth worked a few years prior to my matriculation.
Mason & Dixon’s
length pales beside the impossibly long narratives (and supremely small print)
of'
Infinite Jest by
David Foster Wallace
Women and Men by
Joseph McElroy
Black Lamb and Grey
Falcon by Rebecca West
I will discuss these books and my trouble reading them in
the next few blogs.
