It’s time to take stock of my reading for the year. In the sidebar on the right, you’ll see a partial list of my books for the year.
I read about 75, plus about 40 journals (the journals aren’t listed). It’s not a particularly staggering number — any bookworm who reads consistently will likely put up higher numbers — but for me, after a childhood and college years spent speed-reading, I’ve worked at slowing down. To bask in the quality. To ponder. To enjoy.
Almost 30 of these books were short story collections. That’s only a very small sample of the wealth of short stories published during the year, but hopefully I got a good enough taste and will buy medicine online onhealthy share a roundup soon about my favorites.
One notable change: I’ve definitely found the pleasure of re-reading. I re-read 10 books. That might not seem that many, but for me, it’s a much larger percentage than normal. It’s comforting to find books that repay renewed attention, and they are always the ones that didn’t give up all their secrets on the first round, and which still coyly resist on the second.
One of my students asked me if he should re-read books, and I told him no. Why? Because he was too young and there was so much good writing out there. In another fifteen years, I told him, then you can start re-reading. Right now? Diversify.
2 comments
Excellent!
I needed some good ideas for books to snag.
Did you enjoy the Marquez?
I’m still not a huge fan of his style,
though there were passages and ideas in “Solitude” that were breath-taking.
Chronicle of a Death Foretold is excellent. It’s more novella than novel, but you can already see the romantic underpinnings of the grand love story told in “Love in the Time of Cholera.” It’s the second time I’ve read Chronicle, and I felt like I enjoyed it much more this time around, as well as better understanding how Marquez was critiquing his society and culture.
I would recommend against Memoir of My Melancholy Whores, however, unless you can appreciate the metaphorical significance of a 90 year old man being attracted to a 7 seven old prostitute.