Apropos of my recent Bibliomaniac’s Guide to Reading I’ve decided to update on what I’ve actually been reading lately. I’m doing this as a reminder to all my comrades and associates who claim they don’t have time to read. Yes you do. You have time to dissect the latest episode of Mad Men, memorize the batting averages of the entire Yankees lineup and make a perfect Bloody Mary, you have time to read a book. I have a full-time job, freelancing, bad habits, a busy social-life and a seriously overbooked Google Reader. But I still read New York and The New Yorker cover to cover every week, and I still read books. Tons of books. Not that I’m so great–the opposite–only that if I do it anyone can do it. So maybe you have children or joint custody of a dog or skin cancer–so what? You still have a library card.
Except if you’re anything like legions of my friends who’ve moved a few times since undergrad, you probably don’t. And that’s precisely where reading becomes a burden; if you don’t like a rerun of Friends, you can just switch to a rerun of Seinfeld. But if you don’t like a book you’ve bought, G-d forbid, in hardcover, you’ve just flushed $25.50 down the toilet. Anyone who’s made that mistake would think twice about buying another book, even from Moe’s or the Strand.
Plenty of local libraries are better stocked and more flexible than you remember, and what they don’t have they’ll bend over backwards to get for you. In turn, libraries give you the flexibility to try something on a whim and hate it and not feel like you have to forgo lunch for the next week. To illustrate, I’m posting a list of all the books I read, borrowed or acquired this month (with a little bleed-back into September), including the totals I spent on them, starting from the most recent and working backwards.
October:
1)Ted Conover, Routes of Man, review copy acquired from Mother Jones (in progress)
2) Zadie Smith, On Beauty, San Francisco Public Library, Main Branch (read)
3) Vladimir Nabokov, Pnin, San Francisco Public Library, Main Branch (read)
4) Patrick Neate, The London Pigeon Wars, San Francisco Public Library, Main Branch (began and returned w/o finishing)
5) Leslie Chang, Factory Girls, San Francisco Public Library, Sunset Branch (in progress)
6) Zadie Smith, Changing My Mind, advanced copy acquired from Mother Jones (read)
7) Avi Shlaim, Israel and Palestine, advanced copy acquired from Mother Jones (in progress)
And that’s just this month. Just saying
3rdworldimagineer
