Unread. As Yet.
With impulsive bookbuying comes a glut of as-yet-unread books. What to do? At present I have the following on Unread Shelf I:
- Orwell’s Down and Out in Paris and London
- David Boyle’s Authenticity: Brands, Fakes, Spin and the Lust for Real Life
- Mishima’s The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea
- Franzen’s The Corrections
- Toby Litt’s Finding Myself
- Haruki Murakami’s The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle
- Geraldine Broooks’ Year of Wonders
- Eric Newby’s A Short Walk in the Hindu Kush
- Hesse’s Siddartha
[the first and last were specifically purchased for overnight hikes: light and not too contemporary]
—and they’re just the ones I really intend to read properly: it doesn’t count the ones which I’ll read in a dilatory coffee-table manner like the aforementioned Ansel Adams opus, 100 Suns, Helvetica: Homage to a Typeface, Taschen’s 1000 Favourite Websites and so on, plus the two linear feet of non-fiction volumes I will read someday but until then will lie dormant on Unread Shelf II, just above the adventure-books section of my bookcases. What brilliant insights might lie within?
The grim calculus: I’m almost 35. Give me, optimistically, 50 more years. I can average a book a week. That’s just twenty-six hundred more books, including the ones I want to re-read.
I’d better start choosing more carefully. I’ve started Anna Karenina once and failed. I still can’t be bothered re-opening Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things no matter how much I admire her politics. Similarly, Gao Xingjian’s Soul Mountain is stalled at a hundred pages in. That said, the first time I attemped D.F.W’s Infinite Jest I had the same problem – and on the second attempt, after it glared at me accusingly for some twelve months, I read it voraciously.
Was it Goethe who was the last polymath, the ultimate, chronologically speaking, Renaissance Man? I’m afraid to even estimate by how many volumes the corpus of human experience expands each year – and even that is a morsel besides the magazines, newspapers, journals, websites, conference papers, interviews and more. How to reconcile the absolute necessity of being intellectually well-rounded with the desire to become expert in something, anything?