Saturday, August 23, 2008

Shelf Life

So it's been exactly one year since I started putting the books I read up on Shelfari, and it seems that in that time I've read 166 books. Which works out to almost a book every two days. And that's not counting books I've started to read but given up on, lit journals, old favorites I've reread, the books I've forgotten to add to Shelfari, and the books I'm currently reading (there are six of them - including The Lost Dog and The Clothes on their Backs from the Booker longlist, Stanley Plumly's Posthumous Keats, Roberto Bolano's incredible Nazi Literature in the Americas, Marjorie Welish's delightful Isle of the Signatories and Raymond Queneau's Between Blue and Blue). And obviously it's not counting books I've read for my research.

And here I was thinking I don't read enough any more.

Of course, keep in mind that the vast majority of these books are slim 60-70 page volumes of poetry, so 166 books isn't as much as it sounds. Still, I have to admit I'm surprised the number is that high.

On the flip side, I was trying to go over the list of books I'd read and realized that there are about a third that I already have no memory of reading. Sigh.

3 comments:

km said...

Surely that count includes trilingual instruction manuals for electronic gadgets?

//I've been waiting to start Plumly's book on Keats after hearing good things about it in the New Yorker.

Falstaff said...

km: Naah. I almost never buy gadgets, and when I do I try to make sure they're the kind where I don't need to bother with instruction manuals.

I have to say I'm underwhelmed by Plumly's book so far, though in all fairness, I've only got some 50 pages or so into it. So far it seems repetitious and somewhat trivial (do I really care which of the portraits of Keats - almost none of which I've seen - is the most accurate?). Still, it may get better. If you really want to read quas-biographies though, I heartily recommend the Bolano. The man out-Borgeses Borges.

Nandan said...

>> On the flip side, I was trying to go over the list of books I'd read and realized that there are about a third that I already have no memory of reading. Sigh.

- this 'reminded' me of http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n-a8ELOVig4 :)