What We Talk About When We Talk About Reading

Khalil Huffman's blog, Every Book Since January, on which he's been listing every book he's read since July 2006 has gotten me thinking about how many books I read a year. It's one thing to be a voracious reader, but it's another thing to document what your reading–it creates an interesting window into a person's intellectual life. It's made me start to document (in my journal), what I've been reading and the different ways that I read.

I realize that sometimes I will read the first ten to twenty pages of several books in what I call the "trial period" before I decide on any one book to invest my time in or that I very often read almost all the way to the end of a book then put it down and never finish it–Jose Donoso's The Obscene Bird of Night–why did I read you to your 570th page only to not finish you? And lately, several books have been sharing my attention equally, a book for every situation: William Gaddis' The Recognitions for home (because it's big and heavy), The Collected Books of Jack Spicer (poetry for home), Jane Jacob's The Life and Death of Great American Cities (for commuting), and Jean Day's Odes and Otium for my lunch break (although I have to admit that mostly I end up carrying the book around in my purse rather than reading it, which has more to do with my shortish attention span than the quality of the book). Sometimes I am able to get a fair amount of reading done through this method of book-to-match-situation and sometimes not so much. One thing this method robs me of is the grand sense of accomplishment derived from long stretches of complete attention to one text. At the end of the day, my reading habits don't necessarily match up to my idea of myself as Serious Reader. In some ways, I am a serious reader, an immersive one. If I'm really into a book, I can spend a whole Saturday in bed reading, only getting up to do absolutely necessary things. But the whole apparatus of work and routine and social life interfere with the quiet and stillness demanded of that kind of intensive reading.

Yet somehow through this chaos, I've managed to read a few whole books this year:

Fredrick Nyberg's A Different Practice
Hunter S. Thompson's Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail '72
Bhanu Kapil's Incubation: A Space for Monsters
Roberto Bolaño's Distant Star
Chip Delany's Dhalgren
Julio Cortazar's The Diary of Andres Fava
Javier Cercas' The Soldiers of Salamis
Raymond Carver's What We Talk About When We Talk About Love
Jack Spicer's The Collected Books


'Every Book Since January' has also made me wonder what other people have been reading since January. So, what have you read?