I have this thing about buying books. The problem is I don’t always read them. Hell, most of the time I don’t any of them, let alone even some of them. But that doesn’t stop me from buying them. I think part of my “problem” is rooted in the fact that I like to collect things. Through the years I’ve collected everything from baseball cards, to scratch-n-sniff stickers, to CDs, back to baseball cards, and so on. More or less, given enough time to pass, I grow disinterested with whatever it was I was collecting and in one fell Ebay swoop get rid of everything. If you’ve ever seen the movie Adaptation there’s a part where the character John Laroche is talking to Susan Orlean’s character about the hows and whys of his collecting habits:
I dropped turtles when I fell in love
with Ice Age fossils. Learned everything
about them. Collected the shit out of
‘em. Fossils were the only thing made
any sense to me in this f**king world.
Y’know?
Later in that conversation he says:
I’ll tell you a story. I once fell
deeply, profoundly in love with tropical
fish. I had sixty goddamn fish tanks in
my house. I’d skin-dive to find just the
right ones. Anisotremus virginicus,
Holacanthus ciliaris, Chaetodon
capistratus. You name it. Then one day
I say, f**k fish. I renounce fish. I vow to never set foot in the ocean
again, that’s how much f**k fish. That
was seventeen years ago and I have never
since stuck so much as a toe into that
ocean. And I love the ocean!
That exchange is one of my favorite pieces of writing/dialogue/acting in any movie ever. Probably because it hits home. But back to the point.
A year or so back one of the books I purchased was Nick Hornby’s The Polysyllabic Spree. The book is a collection of monthly essays he wrote for The Believer magazine. Essentially these essays chronicled a month-by-month blow-by-blow of his buying/reading habits. As Hornby explained in the first essay of the book:
So this is supposed to be about the how, and when, and why, and what of reading–about the way that, when reading is going well, one book leads to another and to another, a paper trail of theme and meaning; and how, when it’s going badly, when books don’t stick or take, when your mood and the mood of the book are fighting like cats, you’d rather do anything but attempt the next paragraph, or reread the last one for the tenth time.
I’ve only read one of Nick Hornby’s books cover-to-cover (High Fidelity) but I freaking loved it, and because of that I own most of his back catalog because I love the way he writes: lots of music, lots of sport, and lots of self-deprecating humor. I got the idea for the MixTape essays from Hornby’s book called Songbook. Though I’ve still yet to finish the MixTape essays I figured what the hell, I’ll give writing about books a try.
Hornby goes on to explain in The Polysyllabic Spree that he doesn’t want the column to imply that he spends too much money on book (he already realizes that on his own,) that he shows favoritism to relatives/author friends of his (it goes with the territory of being a writer,) nor that he is trying to show off his literary prowess (he’s not.) If you’re reading this I’d like those same rules to apply. Though I rarely (think 1 in 100 books I buy) purchase a book brand new, even hitting up used bookstores and the Goodwill adds up; I realize that. And I will probably write about books that friends of mine have written/are publishing/etc. because, well, if that’s what I’m reading, that’s what I should be writing about. And for the last one, I know any list of anything can seem self-serving at first glance. But it’s not meant to be. If anything I should probably feel embarrassed about how few of the books I purchase that I will actually end up reading. That and the fact that there will probably be a lot of books that you see that I probably should have already read. I know. So lets get that out of the way first.
Basically how this column will go is around the 1st of every month I will list every book that I purchased/received as a gift and then I will list every book that I read from the previous month. For instance, the first column will be for books I bought/read in June 2010 even though it’s currently July. With these lists will be some sort of explanation. Why I bought the books. Where I bought the books. Why I gave up on certain ones. Why I couldn’t seem to put down others. Crap like that.
I want this column to be fun. I want it to serve (for me) as a way to catalog my spending/reading habits. And perhaps most important, I think if I make this sort of list public, that might help me force myself into devoting more time to read. If you, on the other end of this, is willing to go along for the ride, please feel free to throw the proverbial rotten tomatoes at me if I’m not pulling my weight. And yes, you can feel free to throw suggestions my way.
The first column will be up soon. I can’t wait to see where this goes…
