Pardon the title, I was trying to come up with an apt phrase to describe why we don’t always finish books we enjoy. Perhaps, ‘Stupid life! Getting in the way of my reading!’ would have been better.

Anyway.

Every reader I know has done it once or twice–started a book, really got into it and then put it down. Perhaps the semester began (for students or teachers), you were moving house/having a baby/dealing with Mother Nature, whatever, but by the time you pick it up again you feel you need to start from the beginning so you won’t miss anything. Like some sort of internal book expiration date.

What got me thinking about it (this time) was an article by Joe Queenan in the New York Times about reading more than one book at a time. I usually read anywhere from two to five books at a time. More than that and I feel overloaded. Like having more kids than you can handle–one more and your brain will explode, you just know it. Mr Queenan, who is obviously on crack, says he’s currently in the middle of twenty-five books. I know people who can’t read more than one at a time. I also understand the mania of not being able to NOT start a book, but I also know that if I try to read more than five books at once I’ll give up on some of them. I wouldn’t consider myself actively reading most of them.

Queenan says he’ll be long dead before he finishes The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire because he’s only 400 pages into it. By his standards, which I’m gathering are that you’re still reading a book if you enjoy it and would like to read to the end, I’m in the middle of probably twenty.

1. Northern Lights (the British edition of Philip Pullman’s The Golden Compass)
2. Reading Like a Writer by Francine Prose
3. Every Book its Reader by Nicholas Basbanes
4. The Moonstone by Wilkie Collins
5. Remembrance of Things Past by Prout
6. The Merry Recluse by Caroline Knapp
7. The Art of Fiction by John Gardner
8. The Writing Life edited by Marie Arana
9. Purgatory and Heaven of The Divine Comedy
10. The Platform of Time by Virginia Woolf
11. The Complete Short Stories of Kafka
12. The Brothers K by Dostoevsky

I’m sure there are more than those, though.

And I don’t consider having ‘read’ a book until it’s completely finished. Even books of essays and short stories. I read all but the final story in Dancing on Tisha B’Av and still don’t consider that completed so it didn’t go in by chronological list of books read.

With Mr Queenan as an example, though, those books are back in fair play, I think. Yay! Off to catch up!

[From a previous blog. Original post date: 8 August, 2006]