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.

The Shelf in question

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.

it also gives me time to answer important questions like if i actually want to read infinite jest or if i want to make better use of it and turn it into a sculptural piece

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!

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