![]() ![]() ![]() If I keep this pace of almost 3 letters per year, I’ll be done this project by 2027 (and then I’ll probably just start again). This year, I finished C and got through D, E and most of F. In 2018, I got through A, B and most of C. I have also made exceptions for borrowed/library books and communal Twitter events, all of which slow my progress somewhat, but since the pleasure is in the journey, I also enjoy these diversions and side-trips.Īll of which is to explain why most of my reading for the year falls within a fairly small alphabetical range. Nor does it mean that I am entirely rigid in my system it initially intended to involve only books that I had already started, but gradually I have allowed alluring new books to slip into their place in the alphabetical queue. But at least I’m now cycling between 20-30 books rather than hundreds, and focusing primarily on a single book. ![]() Of course, this doesn’t mean that I now read only one book at a time. I already tended to arrange my reading alphabetically, so this simply built in the requirement that I had to finish a book before moving on to the next one. I hit on the idea of methodically working my way through all of those never-completed books one at a time from A to Z (from Achebe to Zola, if you will). It was at this point that I realized that the only way to overcome the negative effects of an absurd and ill-advised reading strategy, I was going to need another absurd and ill-advised reading strategy. How many times can you say “Oh yeah, I read the first quarter of that book! It’s really good!”? For another thing, I realized that I’m not as young as I used to be, and in the face of inevitable mortality, I’d rather die having finished a few good books as opposed to having started a whole bunch. For one thing, I joined Twitter to participate in the great book conversations that I discovered there, but it’s hard to join in conversations when you have only read parts of so many books. It wasn’t until I joined Twitter two years ago that I began to take stock of my reading life. And indeed, I have often felt that I was reading just the right book at just the right time, some kind of synchronicity between my reading and my life, or between two books I happened to be reading at the same time. Thomas de Quincey’s excellent essay on sortilege and astrology influenced my thinking on this point he accepts that connections exist between things that cannot be rationally understood, so sees value in allowing chance to bring them to light. I continued to enjoy picking up books with no preconceived decision-making process in mind. Over the years, I made compromises (my wife insisted on bookshelves to replace that coffee table, for example) but I never changed my ways. My system became more sophisticated, but the basic principle of moving from one book to the next did not change. One pile became two, then three, and eventually I had a long coffee table covered with nothing but book piles. The problem came when I entered graduate school, moved to a city with excellent used book stores (London, Ontario) and started to become more broadly curious about literature, theory, philosophy, and just about everything else, than I ever had been before. It took me a little longer to finish books, but I quite enjoyed this too when I really liked them, I wanted to savour them, and when I didn’t like them, I was soon able to switch to something else. This had the benefit of keeping my reading fresh, never getting bogged down in one thing, and allowing me to continually be surprised. Then, I would repeat the same process in reverse. ![]() I would read a chapter from the top book, place it in a new pile beside the first one and repeat until the pile was empty. When I was an undergraduate student, I kept a pile of books beside my bed. I have never been the sort of person who could read just one book at a time. When Dorian suggested that I consider writing a review post on my reading for the year, I was keen to share some of my thoughts, but also felt the need to preface it with a confession of sorts, so here goes: Enjoy! (I couldn’t help but add a few editorial comments along the way.) Not only did he write about his favourites, he also described his idiosyncratic reading project. I invited my friend and sometime EMJ contributor, Nat Leach, to write about the highlights of his year in reading. ![]()
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