And While We're on the Subject...

I suddenly have a lot of time on my hands, and I am thoroughly enjoying it. Yesterday morning I finally finished 100 Years of Solitude, which I borrowed from my brother months and months ago and have been reading in fits and starts ever since. I very much enjoyed it, but had a harder time getting through it than I expected. It’s almost certainly a 1-1-1 plot structure; things just happen. For four hundred forty-eight pages. It’s absolutely beautifully written, though, and although I occasionally felt like I was just plodding away at it, I was deeply and unusually satisfied by the final sentence, and am very glad to have read the book.

This is the third book I’ve finished in as many days. Not the third book I’ve read, just the third book I’ve finished. I have this sense that since I have two weeks devoid of real responsibility I really ought to check as many books of my list as possible. In recent months I have successfully limited the number of books I am reading at any given time. When I have five or ten books in progress I find that I only really read one or two of them and the rest sit with bookmarks two or three chapters in and eventually I just have to go and begin again and that discourages me from wanting to try. But I have this nice little three book system that is working for me at the moment: one “serious” fiction book, one “fun” fiction book (and there are several books that could really fit into either categories), and one nonfiction book. BBBC books don’t necessarily count, so I guess I can have up to four at a time.

Occasionally I find that my reading (which actually doesn’t take up nearly as much time as I’d like when school is in session) becomes more of a marathon than a sit-back-and-enjoy pastime. I sometimes feel like the book I’m currently reading is only an obstacle keeping me away from other books and reading becomes more project than pleasure (well…it’s still a pleasure regardless, but it could be more so). I will think, If I read x pages, then I will be finished in y days and then I can start the next book. And then I have to remind myself that the goal is not to get through as many books in as short a time as possible, but to provide myself with a diversion from my normal studies and routine.

But the thing is, in a way it is about getting through as many books as possible. This is not just because there are so many books out there that I want to read, that I think are worth reading, but because I like being well-read. I like it when someone talks about a book (other than popular fiction books) and I can say, “I loved that book!” (or sometimes just, “Yeah, I read that too”). The books I have read define me as an individual, and bond me to other people who have similar interests or parallel interests or overlapping interests. And that’s why I like to have bookshelves in prominent places (which is hard to do in shared housing)—I love learning about people by looking at their bookshelves and I want them to do the same with me.

I suppose I can’t keep every book I’ve read. It adds up, and quickly. I remember helping out at home one weekend when we were cleaning out the garage. We went through boxes and boxes of books and loaded them into our family van (or maybe we had our truck at that point), and then my brother and I drove down to the public library after calling ahead to warn that we were making an especially large donation. On our way back we laughed about the exclamations of amazement as the library volunteers watched box after box of books appear as we unloaded our vehicle. “They must wonder what would possess a family to get rid of their entire book collection” my brother said (and I had visions of our family gathering wide-eyed around a fictional brand new big screen television set), “but what they don’t realize is that we still have twice as many as we just unloaded back at the house.

I also remember a moment over Christmas break this past year. I was sitting in an armchair in our family room reading a book and not really paying much attention to anything when the same brother, out of the blue, laughed and said, “This isn’t your typical American family scene.” Parents and children (well, two of us children at least) were gathered in the family room in the artificial light of the television, and yet not a single one of us was looking at the screen because we were all too absorbed in our reading.

I guess if I had grown up in a family in which we didn’t receive books every Christmas and birthday and holiday, and curl up with our parents in the evenings so that they could read to us, and take trips to the library for family night every three weeks (the length of the check-out period) and make a stop at the little local Crown Books whenever we had reason to be in that particular shopping center, I probably wouldn’t know what I was missing out on. But I have every intention of subjecting my own children to such experiences.