We get older, we get more set in our ways. It’s as inevitable as wrinkles and knee aches. We get set in our ways, and we stop changing. Even a change in toothpaste or underwear brand would be anathema to the Everyday Routine.
I’m 36, and not even close to the slow-down of retirement yet. But one thing I’ve noticed that I’ve become more stubbornly intransigent than ever about is…
… my reading list.
Because it is, and always has been, the most dynamic aspect of my life.
Going back to my school years, I would duck the bullshit assignments like George Eliot or Michael Dorris, instead opting for my own pursuit of Ernest Hemingway and Clive Cussler and Eldridge Cleaver.
Like all book freaks across the world and throughout history, I have a reading pile that fills my nightstand drawer and is littered across the floor, and spreads under the bed. There are books from five years ago that I partly read that have only since gathered an impressive amount of dust but which I pledge to consume to the last syllable some day in the nebulous future (I’m looking at you, The Recognitions by William Gaddis).
But as I get older, I realize that life is simply too short for subpar reads. It’s why I put down a Salman Rushdie novel after half a page, why Mason and Dixon by Thomas Pynchon after 300 pages remains a paper brick my cat Ambrose claws to demand food in the mornings, and why there were even a few Don DeLillo novellas I could not finish that lie in wait, probably never to be finished.
And with this understanding and acceptance has come the realization: my reading time is probably the most sacred thing in my life, aside from my toddler and American Democracy and perhaps weekend sleep.
The most beautiful thing, to my mind, is being able to pursue a reading list that drifts with the years of curiosity and is unfettered by any constraints at all. I try to keep up with bestsellers, from Stephen King’s latest to crazes like the Stieg Larsson novels of about a decade ago. But my interests just dart from one thing to another, like a huge synapse firing without any sense at all – and which enriches my brain and soul for it.
Like when I found a different translation of Don Quixote three summers ago, I adore the big challenging books which make me want to call an early bedtime just to get in a few extra pages. Moby Dick was one of these, and so was The Sea of Fertility tetralogy by Yukio Mishima. I am currently reading a book called Rebellion in the Backlands, published in 1902 by Euclides da Cunha, considered the best book Brazil ever produced and which is a feast but which puts me to sleep, without fail, after three pages of small type every night. It is the best sleep aid that I have ever indulged in, short of narcotics.
But I will keep at it. Because there in that pursuit of the new and the undiscovered is the way to keep life fresh and rich with possibility.
I just finished my 30th book of the year, again besting my “reading list challenge” on the Goodreads site. I have colleagues who try to read 50 or 100 books in a single year, almost all slight genre novellas. I’m the kind of person, however, who will spend two months savoring 2666 by Roberto Bolano for the sixth time (true fucking story), and can’t be bothered to try and reach some numerical quota.
So I made a handful of discoveries this year of great books. And here are some of the discoveries I made this year.
Neighbors by Thomas Berger – A terrific comedy equally hilarious and horrifying, about neighbors who move in next door to a normal man, and who, within twenty-four hours of proximity, jump-start felonious intrigues. Anyone who lives in suburbia would be hard pressed not to love it.
Nightmare Alley by William Lindsay Gresham – A walk on the wild side of mid-20th century America, the seedy underbelly of a booming America. Following a carnie who becomes a flim-flam seer, it is among the bleakest meditations on the American Dream I have ever encountered.
The 120 Days of Sodom by the Marquis de Sade – Totally gross, a book I put off for years despite many recommendations. No prude am I, but after the 45th description of eating feces, I realized this was simply the product of a syphilitic prisoner’s insane delusions.
My Pandamoon colleagues Brian Cohn (The Last Detective) and Dave Housley (This Darkness Got to Give) wrote some barnburners that fit my eclectic tastes. The former is a hard-boiled mystery amid an alien apocalypse, the latter is a Grateful Dead-vampire thriller that never lets up. Matt Coleman, with his Juggling Kittens, is as good as anyone out there writing today, I also found.
I read a metric shit-ton of books about Mongolia and its independence – a quest I continue to undertake in pursuit of a work in progress called Lama with a Gun. One book that was a distinct challenge: a memoir of a Buddhist lama called the Diluv Khutagt which only existed in a handful of copies on the East Coast – and just a single one in all of the cultural mecca we call New Jersey (Thank you, Princeton University!)
My colleague Laura Kemp’s novel Evening in a Yellow Wood is about to make a big splash – and I am privileged to have read it early.
And here is to yet more blissful, but not laconic or lazy, hours reading whatever the hell we damn please in 2019…