I’ve been wasting time over my Shelfari page. I opened it quite some time ago,posted a few titles, gathered a few friends, and then forgot about it till recently.
Since high school I’ve kept lists of the books I read. Silly, maybe, but my memory is weird and occasionally I need something to trigger it—like the title of the book I know I read ten years ago. What surprises me is that once I remember the book—remember actually reading it—a good deal of the book re-emerges from the cracks into which the details have fallen over time.
But there are gaps in the lists. Like other things of the sort, I’m inconsistent, and in some cases I’ve lost the lists. So I’ve been painstakingly reconstructing my reading history. I decided that Shelfari is as good a place as any to keep these lists. Who knows? They may be of interest to others.
But it has been kind of fun tripping through all these old memories.
What I’ve decided to do, though, just to keep me honest, is to list only those books I do in fact have a clear memory about.
See, part of my mis-spent youth was my senior year in high school. I managed to cut two-thirds of it. I was so utterly bored with school. The thing was, instead of the usual adolescent running around looking for trouble, most of those days I spent at the local library. (I was so totally a nerd and didn’t really acknowledge it—after all, I played keyboard in a band, I had cool friends, I dressed…well, let’s not go there.) I’d enter the building, find a corner where I fell least observed, and read abook. It really did get to a point where I was reading a whole book every time I sat down there. I ran through those titles we all have come to know and love as Classics.
I do not remember vast swathes of those books. I read them, sure. But.
Partly, despite the fact that I had a post graduate vocabulary, most of those books were over my head. I mean, I read Ulysses during that time, but I didn’t remember much when we entered the reading group for it a few years ago. It was like an entirely new book.
So I’m being selective what I put in my Shelfari shelf. If I remember the story, the characters, good parts of the experience, I list it. If I draw a blank, even though I know I read it, I’m leaving it off. For now. So while I knkw I read most of Charles Dickens (acquiring my first major burn-out on an author) I only clearly recall some of them.
So I will have to reread Dickens.
And Conrad. And DeFoe and Fielding and Galsworthy and Wharton and…
Not a bad prospect, actually, but I may not get through it all. There are other books. I have a stack on the floor of my office I ought to read to review.
Such problems!
What has emerged, making this list, is the major divide. A lot of science fiction. No surprise there. I’ve always drifted toward it by preference, I’ve always gotten more out of it than most other forms of literature. But then there’s history. A lot of history. Some science.
Zero poetry. Never been a big one for that. I’ve tried, but frankly, with one or two exceptions, most poetry just leaves me flat.
Anyway, I have been wasting time with this. There are things I need to do. I’m doing them. But not as quickly as I should.
But dip in to my “library” and take a gander. It’s instructive. Of what, I don’t know.
All in all, I’m estimating that to date I’ve probably read maybe 4,000 books. I’ve got about that many in my personal collection. Could be more. Don’t know how many of them are going to end up on the list. But it is a way of organizing my memory.
Kind of fun.