Reflections on Reading and Recommendations: Retracing One’s Steps and the Vector of Reading
I must have read thousands of books in my relatively short years of existence. This was aided in part by the demands of three university degrees (all of them being directly concerned with philosophy), and a series of jobs during my undergraduate where I would be cooped up in a building for a 12-hour overnight shift with nothing else to do between security checks and card-swipes but read (I recall starting and finishing Don Quixote in three shifts). For the most part, I have read most of the entire history of philosophy, which I was tested on in two grueling comprehensive exams that involved *only* the 300 or so most canonical works. I also elected to supplement that reading with reading history, and the literature of the times.
Yet, I know for a fact that there are books in that historical lineage I only consulted portions of, focused on the most “salient” sections that were necessary to get the major arguments, or perhaps on account of a narrowed focus necessary to write a paper or article. Have I read everything that Cicero ever wrote? No. Did I ever read the three volumes of Das Kapital cover to cover? Not quite. What about the Anatomy of Melancholy, Boethius’ Consolations of Philosophy, all of Aquinas’ Summa Theologica, every single one of Plutarch’s Lives, or all of Juvenal’s Satires? I spot-read, for sure in these cases, varying the depth of engagement on an ad hoc basis.
There are far too many new books coming out, and I’m not talking just the flood of new novels, but books in my various fields of research interest. If one is not scrambling to keep up with new developments as published in journals, it is the full monographs, and this is made ever more challenging when one has the research interest wanderlust of interdisciplinary study that I engage. The most humbling thought is that one cannot read everything, and so one is forced by circumstance to be selective.
Looking back over my reading habits, they oscillate between tunnel-vision focus to desultory curiousity where I read more broadly. Three years ago, I decided to read the autobiographies of Benjamin Franklin and P.T. Barnum, in addition to a biography on Lenin, followed up by a steady reading diet of Shirer’s massive tome on the Nazis, Beevor’s Berlin, and Montefiore’s book on Young Stalin. This was “complemented” in part by a guided reading program offered by an old mathematician to get into set theory (Smullyan & Fitting, Jech, and Rudin’s helpful textbook), some deviations into reading more about the Voynich Manuscript, a few books on cryptanalysis, and the ever-present books I have to read for teaching and research purposes. In the past few years, I’ve also been paid to review faculty-produced books for our university’s newspaper of record, serendipitously being introduced to fine minds and new talents such as Canadian poet Kathryn Mockler, Faculty colleague Mark Rayner’s newest forays into satirical sci-fi, the historically lavish literary prose of Don Gutteridge, and the list goes on.
Also, looking back on my reading habits, when not in the service of writing reviews and so left to my own devices, I find that I’m just not reading novels anymore. It has been a few years that I have not elected to pick up a novel, but instead have migrated to non-fiction. I have followed the now already beaten reading pathway of a novelist I admire, Will Self, who admitted some while back that he was not reading the volume of novels he once did, preferring to focus on non-fiction. And, I have to admit, I haven’t read his fiction in a few years, either (I’ve read everything of his, but not his newest, Umbrella, that I’m not entirely taken with in terms of what the plot entails). I have, however, kept reading his non-fiction pieces with his trademark, almost ostentatious logomania.
I know some very good authors who not only have strong voices, but also produce work that is of consistent quality, and do contribute something new to literature. Of course, I rarely have the time to read their work as much as I would like to. Topping my list of living authors I wish I could dedicate more reading time to would include: Tim Horvath, James Chaffee, Kyle Muntz, Davis Schneiderman, Michael Seidlinger, and (insert an apologetic list of the names of those I have neglected to mention).
Much of the focus of the 20th century had been on the lives of authors, yet so little on the lives of readers. I see the practice of reading as a species of creativity and akin to charting a path. I characterize it as ergodic in a non-mathematical way, but it is not the pathways we navigate within a single book, but between books, that is of interest to me. Sometimes a single book will be the launching point to read others of its kind by explicit reference or simply by subject matter, and at other times it is simply lived circumstances that partially guide the process by which we select the next book in a lifelong series.
I suppose this brings me to the issue of authors recommending (their own) books. I occasionally receive these recommendations, but I do not send any of my own. I simply cannot if I have a self-imposed embargo on reading new novels. Now, I understand that authors are readers as well, but there is something that does not sit right with me in recommending my own authored works to other authors, almost as though I am trying to sell insurance to another insurance salesperson. Although I take any book recommendations according to the intentionality of the recommender to assist if ever I find myself uncertain of what book I should read next - a little like coming to a fork in the woods where there are multiple choices to be made - it is not something I need assistance with. A mix of serendipity, circumstance, and curiousity will be more than ample to assist me in what to read next. I simply don’t require the author as herald announcing, read ye, read ye, now read this! I know many authors crave new readers, and I know they could spend their efforts on someone whose reading list is not as full as mine.
But, if you who are reading this share anything in common with my reading habits, you probably maintain two or more lists of what to read, plotting and planning well in advance. I call one type of list the ideal reading list, and this includes everything that you would choose to read under the most ideal conditions (like, um, being immortal!). As we know, ideality bumps up against reality all too often, and our future reading trajectory succumbs to deviation. And this can happen for lots of reasons. One of the most common being, of course, coming upon a book you feel you must make time for NOW, thus pushing your ideal reading list a bit further down the queue. The other type of list I can think of is the To-read pile, and I mean “pile” quite literally. If you are anything like me, you might have multiple piles of books in different rooms, and even many in just one room that serve different purposes (for me, I have piles for different research projects). These piles tend to grow rather than diminish with time, or at least that has been my experience. The benefit of piles is that it gives one a physical representation of that which is designated to be read, and one can proceed serially. What I appreciate about my little contained chaos of multiple piles in multiple rooms is that, no matter where I am in the house, I always have a little textual friend nearby to give me that much needed intellectual “bump.”
Yet, all lists are subject to the possibility of the interruption, the interval, the intercalation, the displacement, the deviating line, if not also just a more innocent cause such as the pile being toppled or put away for whatever reason, by whomever. What I come to realize is this: no matter how well one plans one’s reading path, reading is a kind of vector, and unless one wants to apply the harshest discipline in micromanaging one’s reading plans to adhere to a strict regimen, it is the vectorial nature of reading that generally leads us from one book to the next.
I am personally fascinated by the choices we make in migrating from book to book, for as readers we are visitors and nomads that pass through books on our way to the next. Along the way, our highly personalized reading path becomes a defining feature of our relation to all future books. Have you ever given thought to why you are on the book you are on now, and by which path you arrived at it? What is the relationship, if any, between the book you are reading now and the last dozen? Was there some kind of unconscious line that you may have followed, a thread connected to a subject matter, an author, a style, or even a barely perceptible cadence or rhythm? I am probably over-thinking this, but it is this unique and highly personalized history of readers and the sequence of what they read that might prove interesting to explore.
My reading plans? Ideally, I am searching to fill holes and gaps in my historical knowledge, or to have what I know embroidered with more detail. There are entire fields of knowledge I would like to acquaint myself with. Maybe I’d like to read about ancient travel, or how to pickle (or how they did it in the middle ages), or understand more about the nature of moths, or brush up on my untidy knowledge of how countries instituted programs for the transition of military to civilian life. From this desk, I see Horace’s Odes winking at me, and I think a book-length essay on colophons has just made a pass at me. The sad binding on a biography of Vermeer seems to beg that I read it again, more carefully this time, but it is the stony non-gaze of the dry-as-dust Foundations of European Art that wants to guilt me into plodding through its turgid prose. And then there are chattering blocs of semiotics, symbolism, irony, Marxism and deconstruction, that only unite in their one refrain of read me now - before it is too late! And then there are the sad yet stoic books with their reams of lore that are etiolated by ever more dust. Surely they implore me to read them, or perhaps are resigned in the fatalism that I simply will not get to them.
This brings me to a few rules that I abide by, for what they are worth:
1) Never recommend books UNLESS one’s recommendations are solicited, or the topic of discussion deals with a subject matter that would permit one to recommend a book on that subject.
2) Never recommend one’s own books, for it is about as unbiased as a reference letter from one’s parents.
3) Never assume that others do not know what to read next; chances are that was planned long ago.
4) Never assume that what one recommends, the other will follow through.
5) Never carpet-bomb a recommendation to an entire list of contacts; being selective rather than indiscriminate about who one recommends a book to shows respect for the person for whom the recommendation is being made. Anything less is a little like spam.
Yet, I know for a fact that there are books in that historical lineage I only consulted portions of, focused on the most “salient” sections that were necessary to get the major arguments, or perhaps on account of a narrowed focus necessary to write a paper or article. Have I read everything that Cicero ever wrote? No. Did I ever read the three volumes of Das Kapital cover to cover? Not quite. What about the Anatomy of Melancholy, Boethius’ Consolations of Philosophy, all of Aquinas’ Summa Theologica, every single one of Plutarch’s Lives, or all of Juvenal’s Satires? I spot-read, for sure in these cases, varying the depth of engagement on an ad hoc basis.
There are far too many new books coming out, and I’m not talking just the flood of new novels, but books in my various fields of research interest. If one is not scrambling to keep up with new developments as published in journals, it is the full monographs, and this is made ever more challenging when one has the research interest wanderlust of interdisciplinary study that I engage. The most humbling thought is that one cannot read everything, and so one is forced by circumstance to be selective.
Looking back over my reading habits, they oscillate between tunnel-vision focus to desultory curiousity where I read more broadly. Three years ago, I decided to read the autobiographies of Benjamin Franklin and P.T. Barnum, in addition to a biography on Lenin, followed up by a steady reading diet of Shirer’s massive tome on the Nazis, Beevor’s Berlin, and Montefiore’s book on Young Stalin. This was “complemented” in part by a guided reading program offered by an old mathematician to get into set theory (Smullyan & Fitting, Jech, and Rudin’s helpful textbook), some deviations into reading more about the Voynich Manuscript, a few books on cryptanalysis, and the ever-present books I have to read for teaching and research purposes. In the past few years, I’ve also been paid to review faculty-produced books for our university’s newspaper of record, serendipitously being introduced to fine minds and new talents such as Canadian poet Kathryn Mockler, Faculty colleague Mark Rayner’s newest forays into satirical sci-fi, the historically lavish literary prose of Don Gutteridge, and the list goes on.
Also, looking back on my reading habits, when not in the service of writing reviews and so left to my own devices, I find that I’m just not reading novels anymore. It has been a few years that I have not elected to pick up a novel, but instead have migrated to non-fiction. I have followed the now already beaten reading pathway of a novelist I admire, Will Self, who admitted some while back that he was not reading the volume of novels he once did, preferring to focus on non-fiction. And, I have to admit, I haven’t read his fiction in a few years, either (I’ve read everything of his, but not his newest, Umbrella, that I’m not entirely taken with in terms of what the plot entails). I have, however, kept reading his non-fiction pieces with his trademark, almost ostentatious logomania.
I know some very good authors who not only have strong voices, but also produce work that is of consistent quality, and do contribute something new to literature. Of course, I rarely have the time to read their work as much as I would like to. Topping my list of living authors I wish I could dedicate more reading time to would include: Tim Horvath, James Chaffee, Kyle Muntz, Davis Schneiderman, Michael Seidlinger, and (insert an apologetic list of the names of those I have neglected to mention).
Much of the focus of the 20th century had been on the lives of authors, yet so little on the lives of readers. I see the practice of reading as a species of creativity and akin to charting a path. I characterize it as ergodic in a non-mathematical way, but it is not the pathways we navigate within a single book, but between books, that is of interest to me. Sometimes a single book will be the launching point to read others of its kind by explicit reference or simply by subject matter, and at other times it is simply lived circumstances that partially guide the process by which we select the next book in a lifelong series.
I suppose this brings me to the issue of authors recommending (their own) books. I occasionally receive these recommendations, but I do not send any of my own. I simply cannot if I have a self-imposed embargo on reading new novels. Now, I understand that authors are readers as well, but there is something that does not sit right with me in recommending my own authored works to other authors, almost as though I am trying to sell insurance to another insurance salesperson. Although I take any book recommendations according to the intentionality of the recommender to assist if ever I find myself uncertain of what book I should read next - a little like coming to a fork in the woods where there are multiple choices to be made - it is not something I need assistance with. A mix of serendipity, circumstance, and curiousity will be more than ample to assist me in what to read next. I simply don’t require the author as herald announcing, read ye, read ye, now read this! I know many authors crave new readers, and I know they could spend their efforts on someone whose reading list is not as full as mine.
But, if you who are reading this share anything in common with my reading habits, you probably maintain two or more lists of what to read, plotting and planning well in advance. I call one type of list the ideal reading list, and this includes everything that you would choose to read under the most ideal conditions (like, um, being immortal!). As we know, ideality bumps up against reality all too often, and our future reading trajectory succumbs to deviation. And this can happen for lots of reasons. One of the most common being, of course, coming upon a book you feel you must make time for NOW, thus pushing your ideal reading list a bit further down the queue. The other type of list I can think of is the To-read pile, and I mean “pile” quite literally. If you are anything like me, you might have multiple piles of books in different rooms, and even many in just one room that serve different purposes (for me, I have piles for different research projects). These piles tend to grow rather than diminish with time, or at least that has been my experience. The benefit of piles is that it gives one a physical representation of that which is designated to be read, and one can proceed serially. What I appreciate about my little contained chaos of multiple piles in multiple rooms is that, no matter where I am in the house, I always have a little textual friend nearby to give me that much needed intellectual “bump.”
Yet, all lists are subject to the possibility of the interruption, the interval, the intercalation, the displacement, the deviating line, if not also just a more innocent cause such as the pile being toppled or put away for whatever reason, by whomever. What I come to realize is this: no matter how well one plans one’s reading path, reading is a kind of vector, and unless one wants to apply the harshest discipline in micromanaging one’s reading plans to adhere to a strict regimen, it is the vectorial nature of reading that generally leads us from one book to the next.
I am personally fascinated by the choices we make in migrating from book to book, for as readers we are visitors and nomads that pass through books on our way to the next. Along the way, our highly personalized reading path becomes a defining feature of our relation to all future books. Have you ever given thought to why you are on the book you are on now, and by which path you arrived at it? What is the relationship, if any, between the book you are reading now and the last dozen? Was there some kind of unconscious line that you may have followed, a thread connected to a subject matter, an author, a style, or even a barely perceptible cadence or rhythm? I am probably over-thinking this, but it is this unique and highly personalized history of readers and the sequence of what they read that might prove interesting to explore.
My reading plans? Ideally, I am searching to fill holes and gaps in my historical knowledge, or to have what I know embroidered with more detail. There are entire fields of knowledge I would like to acquaint myself with. Maybe I’d like to read about ancient travel, or how to pickle (or how they did it in the middle ages), or understand more about the nature of moths, or brush up on my untidy knowledge of how countries instituted programs for the transition of military to civilian life. From this desk, I see Horace’s Odes winking at me, and I think a book-length essay on colophons has just made a pass at me. The sad binding on a biography of Vermeer seems to beg that I read it again, more carefully this time, but it is the stony non-gaze of the dry-as-dust Foundations of European Art that wants to guilt me into plodding through its turgid prose. And then there are chattering blocs of semiotics, symbolism, irony, Marxism and deconstruction, that only unite in their one refrain of read me now - before it is too late! And then there are the sad yet stoic books with their reams of lore that are etiolated by ever more dust. Surely they implore me to read them, or perhaps are resigned in the fatalism that I simply will not get to them.
This brings me to a few rules that I abide by, for what they are worth:
1) Never recommend books UNLESS one’s recommendations are solicited, or the topic of discussion deals with a subject matter that would permit one to recommend a book on that subject.
2) Never recommend one’s own books, for it is about as unbiased as a reference letter from one’s parents.
3) Never assume that others do not know what to read next; chances are that was planned long ago.
4) Never assume that what one recommends, the other will follow through.
5) Never carpet-bomb a recommendation to an entire list of contacts; being selective rather than indiscriminate about who one recommends a book to shows respect for the person for whom the recommendation is being made. Anything less is a little like spam.
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