List Loop

One of the ironies of the Christmas shopping season is that I buy more stuff for me than I do at any other time of the year. While shopping for books, say, about geology for my rock-obsessed nephew, I start wondering what happened to that copy of Loren Eisley’s Immense Journey that I read during that camping trip to the Loess Hills in 1999. Hey look, Amazon’s got a copy for $8.80. That brings my cart total over $25. Free shipping! Proceed to Checkout. Click. 

(BTW, look for a future post about how I never shop at real bookstores anymore and how that makes Richard Russo mad and Farhad Manjoo happy.)

When I’m not teaching, I read a decent amount. But I’m not afraid (and only slightly ashamed) to say that I probably buy more books than I read.

Here are the books I bought last month:

 Russell Banks's Lost Memory of Skin

Teju Cole's Open City

Chad Harbach's The Art of Fielding

Alfred Kazin's On Native Grounds

Maxine Hong Kingston's I Love a Broad Margin to My Life

Here are the books I read last month:

Chad Harbach’s The Art of Fielding

John Mullan’s How Novels Work

Ishmael Reed’s Mumbo Jumbo

Edith Wharton’s The Age of Innocence

James Wood’s How Fiction Works

The first list contains only titles that I am dying to read, or, in the case of On Native Grounds, dying to reread. The second list, with the exception of Harbach’s novel, contains only titles that I’ve already read, titles that I’m teaching this semester and that need to be reread so that I can gear up.

Here’s a third list. Books I wanted to read over break:

I read 3 of 8. That’s not a bad batting average (.375). If I were a pro ballplayer, I’d be asking for a raise. So why do I feel like a failure? I think it has something to do with the fact that I’m a caught in a list loop. 

Check out my Amazon wishlists:

"Adaptations" = novels/plays/stories that have been made into movies that I like; 

"Adaptations 2" = movies adapted from novels/plays/stories that I like; 

"Beats" = books about the countercultural literary movement of the same name; 

"Depression" = books about America during the 1930s; 

"Nuclear" = novels that have something to do with nuclear bomb testing (a pet interest that lasted a weekend but that I can’t let go of); 

"Wishlist" = the 228 things that I want and that don’t fit any of the other categories.

Then there’s my Safari "Reading List": 

To say nothing of my my home office window-well, which is my on-deck spot for books-that-I-absolutely-must-read-if-I-plan-to-continue-to-call-myself-a-scholar-of-American-fiction, or my 300+ Netflix cue. 

But you get the picture. I'm list-obsessed, which I think makes me totally normal. If this kind of manicuring of the digital ways of organizing the free time we don't have because we're busy managing our digital ways of organizing weren't so common, then this sketch wouldn't be so obviously, painfully funny: 

So, my New Year’s Resolution (I actually have a list of twelve): Be less normal.