What to Read, How to Read It.
Don't you hate it when you get halfway through a book, get distracted by work or play or what not, and then feel a tremendous inertia that prevents you from getting back into the book and finishing it off? It is all the more frustrating when the book is only 220 pages long, like John Banville's The Book of Evidence. Sure, if I just did not like the book, I'd toss it aside and move on. But I like it well enough to finish it. It's not sweeping me off my feet, but it's not that kind of book.
And Banville is important, isn't he? He won a Booker, after all. I am a confessed list-maker, as my book project makes absurdly obvious, and the thing a list-maker likes only slightly less than his own list are other lists. So I look at the list of Booker Prize winners, the list of most important novels of the last 25 years, and so on. And these lists tell me what to read, don't they? After all, the tremendous volume of books being published these days makes us almost dependent on lists to sort the riff from the raff. I look at my bookshelves holding post-World War II fiction and I think to myself, "what of this is worth reading?"
Time has told us, more or less, what is worthwhile from the 19th-century. And I feel a strong pull to read these "classics," and have ever since The New Lifetime Reading Plan sparked my book obsession several years ago. But it never feels sufficient to read the great works of the past. Necessary, but not sufficient.
No, I also need to read books being written in my time. By people who live in the world that I live in, or at least a world that exists contemporaneously with my own (it seems a stretch to say that David Foster Wallace and I live in the same world). Litbloggers have helped diversify what I read, to an extent. I probably would be reading Banville even if he had not won the Booker, since Mark Sarvas is such a fan. And as soon as I catch up on the books already on my shelf (which admittedly will never happen), I'd love to start following the Litblog Co-op recommendations and really branch out. But the fact remains, I only have so much time to devote to reading, and I choose not to sacrifice huge chunks of that time just figuring out what to read in the first place, when I'll probably end up with something that would have been recommend to me anyhow.
