On Reading As Travel

I have close to 6000 books in my house.

Now, this is not a lot compared to some I know.  Harlan Ellison has over a quarter million.  Of course, he has the space for it (barely).  But for an average library, 6000 is more than respectable, and many of those are collectible (which is not why I acquired them originally, it just turned out that way).

I’ve read maybe half of them.

I’ve known for a long time that I will likely never read all the books I own. Given that, owning them seems pointless.  The trouble is, I also never know which ones I will read (or when), so divesting myself of them defeats the purpose of having them—keeping them nearby on the off chance that I’ll pick one up.

(I have a hard time using the library.  The peculiarity of my habits doesn’t fit me to read books “on schedule” or on a timetable, so borrowing them knowing I’ll have to take them back in three weeks means that two days before they’re due I might start reading them.  I’ve bought books that have sat on my shelves for years before I finally picked them up.  This frustrates Donna for a number of reasons.  But for me, also, owning a book is my symbol of personal wealth.)

I don’t lose sleep over what I’ll never read anymore.  Some time in the last four or five years I stopped fretting.  I signed onto one of those online reading pages—Goodreads—and began adding in all the books I’ve ever read and the fact is, I don’t remember at least 500 of them that I should, no doubt many more that just fell through the cracks, possibly by virtue of not being worth remembering.  My current total is over 2600, but I know that’s short, and if I add in all the partials, the magazines, individual articles, etc, then my lifetime total to date is probably over 4000, maybe 4500.

And I don’t remember over a third of them.

I do not reread.  There are a handful of books I’ve read twice, maybe four or five more than that.

For a few years I did book reviews, which forced me to read books I would otherwise not have bothered with, and this provided some great pleasures.

But the fact is, for the dedicated reader, it is impossible to read everything worthwhile, never mind everything.  So you can either stew in anxiety for all that you will miss or immerse yourself in what you can.

On FaceBook one of those lists has been going around, one I’ve seen in various forms for years, the 100 books the BBC thinks everyone should read but of which most people have only read 6.  The list has some remarkable books on it–-Les Miserables, Of Mice and Men, Middlemarch, War & Peace, etc.—but also some “huh?” moments, not so much because the choice is bad but because there are better books by the same author.  So while I could tick off 42 on the list, I could make a separate list of my own with over 200 that should have been on that list that I did read.

I read—many people read—for two purposes (three if you wish to specify that “for fun” is its own category, but I think that is implicit in my reason number two).  The first is obvious, for information.  I have a sizable reference library, many of the books of which I would never recommend as “pleasurable” reading, a good number of which I never intended to read cover-to-cover when I bought them.  But a lot of people who are not, by definition, Readers read for information.  I’ve known many people who devour technical books and the like but would never think to pick up a novel or a book of essays or short stories.  They do not read for the second, and in my opinion more important, reason.

I read to be more.

It’s nebulous stated that way.  What do I mean More?  Those who have a lifetime of deep reading behind them understand.  Reading enlarges our internal landscape, widens the horizons, gives us a sense of scope we would otherwise not have, matched possibly by the seasoned world traveler, the sort who picks up enough local language to function, and lives in a country long enough to dive into the parts not on the official tour.  By deep reading, my sense of my own Self has grown, and I apprehend more of the gestalt that is the world.

But also, the act of reading physically increases the connections in the brain, increases the brain’s capacity, not in a specified way, but in such a way that the world is both less surprising and more amazing when we encounter new things.  There is an excellent book about this that I recommend—Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain by Maryanne Wolf.  In it, Dr. Wolf details the physiology of reading in a way that convinced me that my long-held belief  is correct that, of all the forms of “entertainment” that affect us, reading is fundamentally different.

So it ultimately doesn’t matter how many books we end up getting through before we die.  What matters is the attention, the exposure, the fact that we read, steadily and widely, and through that become more of ourselves than we would otherwise be.  In this sense, each good book is a country we visit.  Widely traveled is still widely traveled, even if we don’t get to all of them.

Perhaps instead of talking about the books we haven’t read, we should instead talk about the books we’ve been to.  Who we have become from having visited these places is not lessened by all those places we have not and perhaps never will go to.