what am I reading? glad you asked
Ever since the age of about 18, I've never read just one book at a time. At first I probably added a nonfiction book to the novel I always had on the go, and then I started adding more—and more—nonfiction books (I never liked reading more than one novel at a time), until by the time I was 21, and had moved in with two friends, my cohabitors felt driven to try to legislate how high a "stack" I could be allowed to maintain on our coffee table.
But my reading stack survived, and lives on to this day, having also escaped a few, not very serious or sustained, attacks by my wife Kimmie (who now pays it not the slightest attention, and even offers me moral support when I express concern about its size). Where did this stack come from? Why does it exist?
I think there are three reasons: 1) a slow reading speed, 2) a wide array of interests, and 3) a relatively short attention span.
When I say "short attention span", I mean both a short period of attentiveness to a single topic at any one time, which means that I can read from a single book for only about 45 minutes, tops, and often for 30 minutes or less; and, over a longer period of days or weeks, a shifting of interest between topics, which makes me want to delve into a new book before I've finished others already on the go. I always think I'll get back to those unfinished books presently, so I leave them in the stack, bookmarks in place, and there they sit for weeks or months, migrating to the bottom of the stack until I finally decide to reduce its height and reshelve those unfinished books.
Usually I read from four different books each day. My book-reading period is from 4:00 p.m. to 7:00 p.m., punctuated with a couple of breaks, so I generally read for two hours or a bit more. I always start with fiction, attacking that when I'm at my freshest. Right now in the "fiction" slot I'm actually reading the plays of Sophocles as I work my way through volume 5 of The Great Books of the Western World. (The rest of this volume contains the plays of Aeschylus, Euripides, and Aristophanes. I've already made it through Aeschylus.) Because these are works of poetry and of drama, I read them aloud. I've overcome most of my initial shyness and am starting to put more oomph into my performance.
Just now I'm making an exception to my fiction rule, because Kimmie has asked me to read a book aloud to her. Her pick: The Mayor of Casterbridge by Thomas Hardy. This started out as a weekend, after-breakfast activity, and now we're working it in to her post-work routine, so it's become part of my reading period. So I'm having a chance to hone my narrating performance there too. (Kimmie claims that she can understand a book much better if I read it to her than if she reads it herself.) Also, reading it aloud is letting me realize just how good a book it is—even better than I remembered.
If I use my reading period from last night as my example, next up is a new paperback reprint of Caravan Cities by Mikhail Rostovtzeff, a book about the desert caravan trade in the ancient Near East, the English version of which was originally published in 1932. This is research reading for my work in progress, The Mission. I'm really enjoying it, because it throws an unusual light on the history of that time: the light of commerce and international trade, which is not usually prominent in most histories of that time.
Finally last night, in slot 4 of my reading period, I pushed on with Arnold J. Toynbee's A Study of History 2: The Geneses of Civilizations (Part Two), the second of the 10-volume series, published between the early 1930s and, I think, about 1950. I already read, a couple of years ago, the two-volume condensed version of the whole series prepared by D. C. Somervell in consultation with Toynbee, and decided that this work deserves to be read in full. So I'm picking up the Oxford University Press paperback edition piecemeal online. I was lucky to find four volumes of it for sale by a Dutch bookseller, so I got all four of those (volumes 1, 2, 5, and 6). Recently I bought volume 3 online, a library copy, and am awaiting its arrival. (Can I boil down Toynbee's thesis to one line? Let's try: "The true and proper object of study for the historian is not the nation, but an entity called the "civilization", which is a society that becomes developed enough to evolve and leave records of its existence, and if one scrutinizes the 32 civilizations that have been known to exist, one finds that they undergo a characteristic series of developments that amounts to a life cycle.")
The Toynbee reading is also, strictly speaking, part of my research for The Mission, although it is also I think important reading for one's general knowledge and even one's liberal education.
Ah yes: liberal education, a topic I will revert to time and again. For the past year or so I have reserved one of my reading slots for my, what shall I call it, I want to say my "formal" liberal education, even though it is not that—at least not in an institutional sense. It is formal in the sense of being deliberate and planned, and my plan is to start by giving myself a grounding in the so-called trivium or upper 3 of the 7 "liberal arts":
logic
grammar
rhetoric
So far I've studied the 6 books by Aristotle on logic (the so-called Organon), and am now making my way through his On Rhetoric. But last night that got bumped. I'm not going to let it slide, though; I'm committed to liberal education, starting with my own. As far as I can tell, the survival of our civilization depends on it. But more of that anon.
That was my reading for last night. There are maybe 8 or 10 other books in my stack which I may or may not get back to before I reshelve them. If you have a voyeuristic interest in exactly what I'm reading and how far I'm through each book, I'm keeping my reading stats updated at Goodreads.com. Look for me there if you're so inclined.
But now, in any case, you know what I'll be doing come 4:00 p.m. PDT.
