A Reading Year: Past, Present, and Future

By Josh Corman



I’ve read a lot this year. Once I finish the book I’m currently reading (Michael Chabon’s fantastic The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay), I’ll have knocked out twenty-seven novels, two biographies, a collection of essays, and one autobiography-slash-writing memoir (Stephen King’s On Writing).



This flurry resulted from equal parts New Year’s Resolution and spousal ultimatum. My wife, around about last Christmas, had the audacity to ask me how many of the books adorning my swollen shelves I had actually even read. Incensed, aghast, and secretly ashamed, I actually marched upstairs and started counting loudly. This was an unwise strategy, as I soon found that I would be swallowing the humble pie I had been so eager to prepare through my exaggerated display. I stopped shouting when I got to twelve. By thirty-eight I was positively morose. I turned from the shelves and sulked downstairs, where I pretended to busy myself with some earnest kitchen chores (Genius, I thought, because the last place my wife would look for me would be in the kitchen, cleaning up). When Sara came around the corner, eyebrows raised in an expression of barely repressible glee at what she could only assume was my near-total humiliation, I was trapped. But, since the best offense is a good defense: “How many I’ve read isn’t the point,” I said. “Books aren’t like hamburger: you don’t buy just what you’re going to use in the immediate future. Collecting books that you know you’ll want to read later on is half the fun.”

 You’ll be as shocked as I was to find that this eloquent speech made little impression on her. She simply straightened up, like a dutiful bailiff addressing a court room. “You are hereby forbidden to buy even one more book until you’ve finished reading all the ones you’ve bought and haven’t read yet.”

In a court room, so stern a verdict would cause the defendant to seek comfort from his spouse. Well, this is awkward.

Simultaneously devastated and emboldened by the verdict, I removed every unread book from my shelves upstairs and deposited them in a cabinet downstairs. Seeing them isolated like that, the task ahead of me didn’t seem so unmanageable. That very day, I pulled my most recently purchased book, David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest, from its new home and started in (it says something, I think, about the nearly radioactive degree of my defiance that I chose first an 1,100 page doorstop that necessitated almost constant dips into an often insufficient dictionary).

The ultimatum gave me a kick in the pants that, in retrospect, I clearly needed. 2010 had been a lean reading year for a number of boring reasons, and I had drifted pretty seriously from my most beloved hobby. Reading and I fell back into rhythm without much hesitation, and I ripped through book after book, tracking my conquests in a little notebook I had heretofore been unable to find a good use for. I finished Infinite Jest (the best book I’ve read in a long time and well worth the challenge), The Brothers Karamazov, Light in August, two Graham Greene Novels, two National Book Award finalists (Franzen’s much-hyped Freedom and Jennifer Egan’s inventive, even masterful, A Visit from the Goon Squad.) I read Pynchon and Coetzee and Atwood, Ishiguro and Eggers and Hardy, Bolaño and Marquez and Murakami. I’ve even dabbled in Joyce’s Ulysses, although admittedly, I’m not so much reading it as parsimoniously inching through it with an accompanying podcast. In any case, I’ve read a lot.

At some indeterminate point, probably around the time we dropped cable television to save some extra money, the strict terms of Sara’s ultimatum were softened, and I began buying books again, adding to my depleted but still substantial stack in the downstairs cabinets.

The summer was, understandably, a high point in terms of consumption (an ugly word, but apt, in truth), and when I went back to work in the fall, the swoon I anticipated never occurred. I just kept going. Now, in November, I’ve read nearly 13,000 pages, about 414 pages per book. I’ll probably finish Kavalier and Clay this weekend – only 150 pages to go – and then, I’ll have another decision to make. Which book next? All year, I’ve plotted out a course, mixing contemporary and classic, fiction and non-fiction, long and short as a way to keep every book fresh. But now, ten months into my sentence, its original objective is less pressing (the cabinets are still half-full), and I feel satisfied with – if you’ll forgive the grandiloquence – my accomplishment. In fact, It’s been months since I felt encumbered in any way by the confinement of Sara’s proclamation. And so, rather than devour any more of the masses of unread books (waiting, I like to imagine, like dogs at the pound to be selected and loved), I’m going to do something I haven’t done in a long while: re-read an old favorite.

Typically, I don’t re-read (despite Nabokov’s urgings). I’m more aware than ever of how many great books there are, and how many of them I haven’t read, and it’s always seemed like re-reading cheats me of discovering something new (that all this time spent with my face buried in books could have been spent playing with my son, giving back to the community, or becoming a better husband is neither here nor there, I promise). But really, the choice between reading or re-reading is not a choice between discovery or stasis. Re-readers often claim that they catch, comprehend, and connect much more in a book the second or third time through. I have found that this holds true, even in my limited re-reading experience. Of all the books I’ve read more than once (The Harry Potter series, The Lord of the Rings, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Of Mice and Men, Fahrenheit 451, 1984, The Grapes of Wrath, The Road, High Fidelity, Watchmen, The Lord of the Flies, and Wise Blood), more than half were re-read for academic purposes - either as a teacher or student, and so only kind of count. In each of those, I was drawn to new and different elements, ideas, sentences, and phrasings. I don’t regret a minute of the process.

A good book, the way I see it, may endure a single exposure, but a great one should stand up to scrutiny time after time. Is it as engaging? As revealing? As true? If so, you’re probably looking at a personal classic – every book I listed above meets the criteria for me.

Now it’s time for a test. For years, I’ve called The Lord of the Rings my favorite book, and I’ve meant it every time. I first read it in high school – just after the initial thrill of my late discovery of Star Wars was wearing off – and again in college, right around the time Peter Jackson’s The Return of the King came out. That means it’s been eight years since I read my favorite book. That’s too long. I need to revisit Tom Bombadil and Lothlorien, Emyn Muil and the tower of Barad-dûr. After a long, rewarding year sailing the rough, thrilling seas of unread books, I deserve a chance to kick back and float down the lazy river of a comfortable, well-worn tome.

Let me go so far as to suggest that you do the same as 2011 comes to a close. Go back to your shelves (or that unruly pile that you trip over a few times a week) and take a repeat trip through a book you love. Think about it: Winter is coming (for those of you in Los Angeles, just pretend like the word Winter actually means something), and the time for hot tea, warm fires, and heavy blankets is upon us. What better time to curl up with an old friend.

The only question left is: Which book is calling your name?


By Josh Corman