Reading Goals

 

I have an insane number of unread books. I suspect there are a great number of other people who suffer that same ailment: they who perhaps have too many books to read in the time remaining them; yet who, perplexingly, buy ever more books, despite the sobering fact that they will likely never complete all those they already own. I wonder why that is? That’s a silly question; they – we – have hope that they will have the time to fully peruse their entire library.

One thing is for sure; most readers will read those titles most recently purchased and leave those bought ages ago mouldering on the shelves, hidden behind ever deepening stacks and rows of titles arrayed in front of them, having sometimes completely forgotten what is hidden behind them.

So, what’s to be done? The easiest solution would be to never visit a bookstore or bookselling website again. Fat chance there.

Another solution is to develop a reading strategy. (That may not prevent the person in question from purchasing new, but it will at least pull some of those woefully neglected orphans down from the back ranks of the bookshelves.) I’ve done such a thing.

How so? Not randomly. By developing a narrative.

I’d recently been watching some WW2 documentaries and decided that I might read some of the nonfiction titles I owned. Then I thought I might add period fictions into the mix, read chronologically (not by publication date, but by narrative calendar year). The nonfictions would add context to the fictions. Ground them, so to speak.

But, as I was just then reading John Reed’s “Ten Days That Shook the World,” I decided that I might expand my reading plan back to that day. That would give me an opportunity to read (or reread, as the case may be) F. Scott Fitzgerald’s “This Side of Paradise” and Hemingway’s “The Sun Also Rises.” I began to pull other titles down from my back shelves, fictions and memoirs by Evelyn Waugh, Christopher Isherwood, etc. I was onto something, I thought. Before I knew it, I had decided, given how many other books I owned but had not read, I might consider adding other titles like, “To Kill a Mockingbird” to the mix, set during the Depression but written years later. You can imagine how many other books might be added to that steadily gather pile.

Long story short, I realised that the scope of my reading plan would be epic indeed; it would, by and large, span the lifespan of my long past Lost Generation ancestors (plus a little more): from the latter 1880s to the 1970s, read more or less chronologically. As this was an ever-evolving list, at that time, given those prior mentioned WW2 documentaries, I was already deep into William Shirer’s “The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich,” something that I’d been picking at for years. I’ve since completed it and “Ten Days…” which inspired me to finally read Boris Pasternak’s “Dr Zhivago.”

One wonders then what those earliest titles might be, those reaching back into the 1880s: Dostoyevsky’s “Crime and Punishment” and Henry James’ “The Portrait of a Lady.” Yes, “Crime and Punishment” is earlier (1866), but it does present the Human Experience of the latter Victorian Age (or in this case pre-Russian Revolution) that then provoked the sweeping changes experienced during the Edwardian, as James’ work spans both the Victorian and Modern literature movements. I’ve even decided to finally pull down Tolstoy’s “Anna Karenina” (1878 – close enough to the 1880s) from its lonely perch, seeing that both it and “C and P” help to illuminate the Russian world before the socialist revolutionary movement took root (the first failed Revolution being 1905). That has inspired me to read not only “Stalin – Passage to Revolution” (leading up to the October 1917 revolution); but also “The Five, the Untold Tale of the Women Killed by Jack the Ripper,” deconstructing the lives of those poor women, leading up to their tragic end in 1888 (not prostitutes at all, it would seem).

The list I’ve curated it too long to list here, but it is epic indeed in span. It also gives me the opportunity to tackle the Russians, E.M. Forster, D.H. Lawrence, and a host of other authors I’d hitherto neglected. Scattered throughout will be selections from McClelland and Stewart’s New Canadian Library.

All these works, fictional and nonfiction, will give me a greater appreciation of all that influenced and later unfolded throughout the long history of the Lost Generation and the 20^th Century.

One thing is for certain: it will take years to complete, given my relatively slow reading rate. No matter. It’s the journey that matters, not the end result.