To Read or not to Read

A friend of mine reads over 100 books a year.  That’s right.  A staggering feat of one book every 3.6 days with about a 40/60 non-fiction to fiction split. To put matters in perspective, he and I both happened to read Paul Auster’s novel, 4-3-2-1, an extremely dense 850-page book that took me three weeks to finish. That’s about 280 pages a week for me…not too bad, right? 

But at my friend’s rate, assuming an average of 300 pages per book, he must read at more than twice that rate, around 575 pages per week or 82 pages per day. And this doesn’t allow for any I-don’t-feel-like-reading breaks. You know, those days when you just want to open a bag of chips, turn on the baseball game and have a few beers? After reading 4-3-2-1 I needed to cleanse the pallet a little, so I took a few days off of reading altogether before diving into a comic book (Doonesbury: The Reagan Years – an excellent read, BTW) followed by the extremely short and entertaining Squirrel Seeks Chipmunk by David Sedaris, and now I’m nearly through yet another light read, Seinfeldia. Only after I complete this lightweight morsel will I finally take on a book with more substance. 

So how does my friend do it? His simple answer to me was “I don’t watch TV.  If I have downtime, I read.” Pretty simple, right? I don’t really watch TV either, except baseball and football, but I am an expert in finding other ways to pass time without actually accomplishing anything (I’m doing one right now!). But clearly the practice of turning off the TV or phone or computer to engage in some other pursuit – reading, practicing an instrument, taking a class, learning to dance – really can lead to amazing results.

Like my friend, I log all of the books I read. I’m up to fourteen in 2017 – a very good clip for me. Here are the tallies for years past:

2016 – 21

2015 – 19

2014 – 11

2013 – 13

2012 – 8

2011 – 12

2010 – 8

2009 – 12

2008 – 28 (I’m not sure what happened here, except to say it was my son’s first year in all-day school, so I must have taken advantage of it.)

Things get a little shaky after this from a record keeping perspective, but you get the idea. Except for the outlier of 2008, I’ve been around a book a month guy, though it looks like I might be inching closer to a book every two weeks guy. Not a bad clip, and it might be a good goal to finish around 24 books a year.

I’m also someone who looks up words when I’m reading and logs the ones I think are worth remembering (I have an Excel spreadsheet of about 420 words I’m trying to master), and that slows me down considerably.  One would hope that over time I would become more knowledgeable and not have research so many words, thereby increasing the number of books I read each year. 

One would hope…and yet, last night I once again had to look up the word feckless, despite its inclusion on my spreadsheet for the past eight years. 

How’s that for feckless?

Paul Auster's Winter Journal

If I was able to transform my writing to that of another author, few names would be placed higher than that of Paul Auster.  I was first introduced to Auster’s works by chance when I spotted The Brooklyn Follies on a library shelf, and have since devoured an additional dozen or so books of his, each as unconventional as the last, and each entirely compelling.   

Auster’s most recent book, Winter Journal, is a memoir, but not in the traditional sense (nothing Auster writes can be considered traditional), and the result is a great read, if for no other reason that it twists a tired genre into something odd and thought-provoking.

First and foremost, he makes the unusual choice to chronicle his life in second person.  The book begins:

You think it will never happen to you, that it cannot happen to you, that you are the only person in the world to whom none of these things will ever happen, and then, one by one, they all begin to happen to you, in the same way they happen to everyone else.

And it continues.  Throughout the book, the word “I” doesn’t appear except in direct quotations.  Using the second person is an interesting technique for an autobiography, but I was surprised at how natural it felt.  Auster’s wife is, in fact, not my wife, but when he writes “Your wife was calm, you remember...and even your little daughter was calm” it works somehow, maybe even better than if he’d used the first person, for it breaks down the normal barriers between author and reader.  Just as Auster inserted himself as a character in his novel, City of Glass, in Winter Journal, he’s inserted the reader.

The book forgoes the chronological expectation of a memoir, and instead describes a nonlinear history of Auster’s physical body: the injuries it sustained, the physical pleasures, the scars – both mental and physical – it endured.  At various points, Auster describes the different sensations and actions that his body (and all of our bodies) have experienced:

Your body in small rooms and large rooms, your body walking up and down stairs, your body swimming in ponds, lakes, rivers, and oceans, your body traipsing across muddy fields...

He spends 52 pages identifying the twenty-one permanent addresses his body has lived in, ten pages describing the plot of a movie he identifies with (and he does it so well that I feel I’ve already seen the 1950 film, D.O.A.), and a page and a half listing the countless activities of his hands (“brushing your teeth, drying your hair, folding towels, taking money out of your wallet, carrying bags of groceries...”).

Unconventional?  You bet.  But so much more interesting than a play-by-play of his life. 

As the title suggests, Winter Journal is from the viewpoint of a man who’s entered a new phase of his life, a man who recognizes the ever-nearing finish line and who devotes time to reflection.  We follow him along a car ride home when he takes a careless left hand turn that nearly kills him, his wife and his child.  We witness the aftermath of the deaths of his father and mother.  The prostitutes he patronized.  The failed first marriage.  The boy who dies from a lightning strike before his very eyes.   None of this is done linearly.  Auster writes in a stream of consciousness that has the potential to bewilder, but instead engrosses.

The most compelling pages occur midway through the memoir, when Auster describes the aftermath of his mother’s passing.  On page 124, he writes of a phone call from a cousin:

It is as if she has trained herself not to breathe while she talks, to spew forth entire paragraphs in a single, uninterrupted exhale, long outrushes of verbiage with no punctuation and no need to stop for an occasional intake of air.  Her lungs must be enormous, you think, the largest lungs in the world, and such stamina, such a burning compulsion to have the last word on every subject.

What follows is a heart-wrenching conversation, as his cousin trashes the memory of Auster’s mother, who died just two days earlier.  The episode highlights a good rule to those who are related to gifted writers: be careful what you say, because your Last Word on a subject is sure to be trumped in a more lasting (and more public) way.

If Auster’s techniques are unconventional, the language he uses is entirely accessible, writing very much as he speaks (check out this interview with Terry Gross on NPR’s “Fresh Air" - he's got a terrific voice).  The result is an interesting read from a man whose gifts are so far-reaching, it’s enough to lead an aspiring author to call it a day.