LOOSIE: reading challenge in july?
it's cool. it's subversive. it rejects the new year's resolution AND the new year's ins and outs.
a thought occurred to me last month: i do a lot of talk about reading Real Books but i have a lot of unread books on my bookshelf. not a unique situation whatsoever, but one that disturbed my spirit at the time. i had, without paying attention, become the worst kind of scold, a writer who makes a lot of noise online about people not reading books instead of opening a book myself. i turned my nose up at goodreads warriors who log 100 trashy romances every year because they’re victims of social media performativity, but they were still getting more reading done that i was. my big aquarius brain that went through the academic meat grinder was being outdone by colleen hoover’s acolytes. absolutely not! i opened my copy of moby dick that i started rereading last year and got to work, pens, highlighters, and flags in hand.
the first thing i learned was that i haven’t lost my attention span, despite statistics in the wake of mass social media saying otherwise. turns out, phones demand a lot of attention. you develop a sixth sense that is tuned into its changes — every buzz, beep, and potential notification occupies a permanent portion of zillenial awareness. i read over a thousand chapters of one piece on my phone while others racked up hours on instagram, a 584 page book about a mad captain's revenge is nothing. my reward through the sometimes tortured prose and 19th century racism? gorgeous sentences like: “wonderfullest things are ever the unmentionable: deep memories yield no epitaphs; this six-inch chapter is the stoneless grave of bulkington,” and “… in ahab's case, yielding up all his thoughts and fancies to his one supreme purpose; that purpose, by its own sheer inveteracy [definition: having a particular habit, activity, or interest that is long-established and unlikely to change] of will, forced itself against gods and devils into a kind of self-assumed, independent being of its own… a vulture feeds upon that heart for ever; that vulture is the very creature he creates.” it’s good stuff!
i’m going to finish a thousand years of solitude after this because that’s another one i started and abandoned, but after that, i've decided to embark on a journey that centers around what i’m calling The Shelf.
it’s a bookshelf of paperbacks, most of which i’ve bought in the past three years. most are unread, and that has to change. from left to right:
Grace Jones: I’ll Never Write My Memoirs (thanks to my college roommate, never ended up giving it back before school was over and we went our separate ways)
The Yoga Beginner’s Bible (why not?)
Bhagavad Gita (weird bit of synergy considering oppenheimer’s upcoming release)
Introduction to the Philosophy of History
Marx’s Selected Writings
Tibor Kalman: Design and Undesign
Hand-Lettering Ledger (read this one before but art references are those things where you have to keep rereading it)
What You Have Left
Lord of the Flies (last time i read this was in high school)
Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine
Black Boy
The Sound and the Fury (another abandoned book, my goodness)
In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens
The Invisible Man
Grendel
Juan Rulfo
Death of a Salesman
Go Tell It On The Mountain
Dawn
The Unbearable Lightness of Being
As I Lay Dying
The Waste Land and Other Poems (i’ve read the waste land obsessively ever since first encountering it in high school, but my knowledge on eliot’s other poetry is severely lacking in comparison)
I’m Thinking of Ending Things (saw the movie and got the book soon after)
Frankenstein
The Wretched of the Earth
The Martian
Slaughterhouse Five
Coming Through Slaughter
Emily Dickinson’s Selected Poems
The Colossus and other poems
Sáanii Dahataał The Women Are Singing (how often do you encounter navajo poetry?)
Friday Black
Fences
The Master and the Margarita (might have to get another copy before starting a reread in earnest, because this one has been through hell)
there's some books pictured that i didn’t list because i’ve already read them or the subject matter and presentation is too dry. regardless, there’s plenty here, a mix of long and short, fiction and nonfiction, authors and poets, etc. etc.
in total, i have 34 books to read with the goal of having it done by next year, because the number of short titles means nothing when life is involved. if i finish it ahead of schedule i will move onto the next Shelf, where the books start getting longer and require much more commitment.
either way, this is my accountability post, so now you all can say you were there for the start of my evolution into a #real scholar. look forward to a literary analysis of ishmael and his hot indigenous whaling boyfriend soon!
OHHH I LOVED slaughterhouse five!! i hope you enjoy when you get around to it! one of the few books ive read through in an entire sitting.