Reading

I thought the other day about starting a record of the books I read. I realized that I had read at least 10-12 books in the past three months, since my retirement, and was curious about my reading habits now, not as any kind of pretention but rather simply a following of what my mind was meandering through. But as I thought about it, running through the titles from mid-May to now, I realized that a simple list of books read wouldn’t at all represent my reading. For one, there have been several books which I haven’t been able or willing to make it all the way through, either being selective (in the case of collections of essays or stories) or giving up (I’ve never subscribed to the notion of seeing through to the end reading something I find dense, thin, pompous, trite, or otherwise not worth my continued attention). Then there came the problem that much of my reading does not constitute books, or even hard-copy texts. I spend a good one to two hours, usually in the morning, reading newspapers online, every day The New York Times, Washington Post, and the Chicago Tribune, occasionally several others, and the online publications Salon, Truthdig, and Slate. And then there are the online magazines — The New Yorker, Smithsonian, The Nation, and occasionally assorted others. And on top of that are the online literary nonfiction sites such as Quotidiana or Brevity. Not that I read all of all of these publications/sites. But the idea of charting one’s reading history by recording the books read (as I used to do in my undergraduate days) doesn’t begin to capture the literary geography of reading in the online world. (Though I guess I’ve begun to do it, at least generally, here.)