Against the Dizay

I love to read but I’m a fairly slow reader. How slow? Well, that’s still to be determined. But I’ll give you an example. In 2006, I bought Thomas Pynchon’s “Against the Day” exactly at midnight on November 20th at Skylight Books in Los Feliz (he’s my favorite author and Gravity’s Rainbow and Mason & Dixon are two of my favorite books). It was a typically weird Pynchonian gathering I had heard about from my mother-in-law who’s a librarian (shout out to Susie). A bunch of TP fans, sadly about ninety percent male (an exception was the Wife), paid for their books at the counter, then milled around until midnight. There wasn’t much interaction, just the feeling that we were “in” on something cool. I thought of a line of Pynchon’s from GR describing Roger Mexico: “eyes boxing the corners of the room at top speed, a pornography customer’s reflex”. TP would have liked it, although I didn’t see anyone resembling the man.

Anyway, upon our departure we encountered a woman who seemed to be sleeping on a bench. But it turns out she was only half-asleep. As we getting into our car, she sat up and said “Goodnight, murderers" in a voice reminiscent of Glinda the Good Witch. Now, having lived in New York for 15 years, I have a pretty good feel as to when it’s pointless to engage the random street person and being addressed as a murderer is not a great jumping off point. I mean, yeah, a case can be made that Western affluence comes at the expense of people in the Third World but it’s not the type of discussion I want to have at midnight on a street in Los Feliz. I think it was Lou Reed who said the street is the dumbest place in the world. So we got in the car. Then, just to prove my point, as I pulled away from the curb, the woman tried to run after us, shouting “Wait, wait”. Of course, a couple of miles down the road we figured out what she was trying to tell us. One of our headlights was out.

I started in on ATD right away but I didn’t finish it in late July 2007. Now, it is 1085 pages and on several trips I took in between I didn’t lug it along. Our cat Grover also fell ill and died in January 2007 and that took a lot of wind out of my sails. But it shouldn’t have taken me eight months to read a book. This is my answer to my friends who think the idea of my trying to read 40 books in one year is taking the fun out of reading. They say I’m making it a chore and call me obsessive when I tell them of how I’ve composed a XL spreadsheet to help track my progress. Even my wife in mid-February floated the idea that I leave the Civil War subset for another year. I may yet. The point is if I don’t set a goal it will not get done. Not that I’m good about setting goals or even good about maintaining a certain pace. I’m not.

Of the several ideas I’ve had about how to keep myself on target the spreadsheet seems the best. But by the time I drew up the XL document, I realized I was already behind. Once totaled, I came up with the sum of 17384 pages. That averages out to about 50 pages a day. Seems doable except sometimes I don’t read 50 pages. Sometimes I read 30 or 20 or 5. Also, I’m not really sure how fast I can read (another experiment in the works). By the end of February I had only finished three books totaling 725 pages or four percent of my goal with the most embarrassing fact being that one of the books is a collection of short stories. A very good book I might add, “Like You’d Understand, Anyway” by Jim Shepard. To date, I’ve also read “And a Bottle of Rum”, “Out Stealing Horses”, and “Mishima’s Sword”. I’m currently wrapped up in “Middlesex”. Completing that I will have read 1498 pages not even nine percent of the year’s goal. I have a lot of reading ahead of me over the next nine months.