The chaos of reading and writing

Earlier this year, I decided to surround myself with all of the books I wanted to read. 

No more sensibly putting off book orders or borrowing more books from the library. To immerse myself in the genre I've been writing and teaching -- memoir -- I would begin amassing all the books from that genre I wanted to read. It's the genre I often write in, and it's also a genre I've been teaching of late, and so quite logically, I need to be more purposeful in loading my bedside table with the personal stories of authors I know and love (and ones I don't know and don't love yet).

I also decided I would tackle the long-deferred TBR list, which included a number of essay collections.

Maybe you're already doing this.

In any event, it meant continuously bothering the librarians at my local library with hold requests, and also ordering books online, even though I was still working my way through my Christmas literary stash. (And then whenever we visited local bookstores, I would buy something to support them).

It quickly became an avalanche of books. Everything I read seemed to point me to new works I need to read, in a never-ending loop. So I read an essay by Rebecca Solnit about a Virginia Woolf piece on walking called "Street Haunting" and in the course of reading it, I realized I have to right now read Solnit’s book on walking AND the essay by Woolf about the same, because if nothing else I know I love walking and I know I love other writers who live walking.

Along with the Solnit books, I made a list of memoirs I wanted to read, with help from the index of Beth Kephart's "Handling the Truth and Philip Lopate's To Show and To Tell, and began buying and borrowing. Home came Parallel Time: Growing Up in Black and White by Brent Staples, a memoir I’d wanted to read ever since reading Staples’ seminal essay "Black Men and Public Space," which I teach (I also follow Brent on Twitter; he's on the Times' editorial board but posts a lot of garden photos). Home came a book by Paul Auster that mesmerized me – my first Auster book! Plus Pedigree by Patrick Modiano, which I’ve wanted to read for a while, and also Home Before Dark, Susan Cheever’s memoir about her father. I also finally read more of Alfred Kazin's work through A Walker in the City.

Unrelated to memoirs, Liz sent me Dora Bruder by Modiano (in Italian!) so that went on the pile, as well.

I also wanted to read books about writing memoir. So I read Inventing the Truth: the Art of Memoir (Zinsser) and The Art of Time in Memoir by Sven Birkerts whom I met at Bennington.

Plus a book I hope to teach as part of a travel literature course I've taught, A Stranger's Pose, by Emmanuel Iduma about his travels throughout his native Africa.

But hold on a moment. I’m polyamorous when it comes to literature so I always have a few Italian books going as well, to feed my literary translation side-business. I learned that an author I’ve translated had published a new book in Italy – a memoir, no less – and I had to buy it. It seemed like the right moment also to buy another Italian book I’d been eying by an author I discovered last year. So two more books – well, three, because I added another one to the carrello (I was shopping on the Italian Amazon website) – were on their way to me. When the books I arrived, I promptly began reading all three, and was inexplicably thrilled to discover in the copious notes accompanying one novel that the concept of borders figures prominently in the work of the author, Piero Chiara, who grew up near the Italian-Swiss border. My mind raced! I don’t even know why but I felt that intellectual shiver that drives me to amass ever more books on the floor, bed, desk and kitchen counter. 

I don't want to suggest it's a real emergency. But I do wonder if I am doing more harm than good. Were we meant to cram so many books into our heads at one time?

(Or should I just say words? To make matters simple, I've left out of this account the New Yorker articles Liz has recommended and anything from The New York Times, my daily gift, as well as any other periodical I subscribe to, including the Kenyon Review and Airone, which Mike calls "Gente" but it's not that gossipy).

And my God where will it end?

In some ways, it sounds noble if my aim is lifelong education and professional development. But I am not immune to the mental fragmentation so rife in lives that are increasingly digitized. Lives where we pay attention to so many different things, real and imagined.

I've just finished the Auster book, The Invention of Solitude, which is itself quite fragmented, or at the very least the second part of it is.

At the same time, I am working on many different pieces of writing, and also working on a mammoth translation project that I am constantly being distracted from.

Is this just another manifestation of the fragmentation rife in modern life? Or perhaps the fragmentation reflects the pandemic -- where non-work life spills into work spaces -- and also perhaps the eternally distracted life of the working mother. Or should I just say this working mother? 

Ever since getting serious about creative writing eight years ago, I’ve been indulging what I call the Life of the Mind. I am, in many ways, living not only the life I dreamed about, but the life I didn’t dare allow myself to dream about. I write, teach, translate and edit, and although I don’t make much money or draw a pension, I am basically paid to revel in literature. To pay attention to literature. That’s one job description that fits me to a tee.

But is what I am doing productive? Am I able to retain what I read? 

I guess I subscribe to the messy desk theory of the world. The more books strewn across your desk (and your bed and your nightstand), the better.

As one writer who's dubbed herself Rust Belt Girl puts it on her blog of the same name, "Relationship status: reading."

Yet I ask as a personal favor, can someone tell me if there is a limit to the number of books one can productively read simultaneously?

Also, does it matter if you only read the first half of a book? Asking for a friend, inasmuch as we should be friends with ourselves.

And of course, happy reading!

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