My Mission on the Side

I want to be educated and thoughtful.  A large problem with this plan has been my historical disinterest in reading.  It’s not to say I don’t read. Every day I read blogs, op-eds in the New York Times, and articles on politics, world events, and history.  I probably spend a minimum of one hour a day reading on the internet.  Likewise, as a political science student, every semester I read thousands of pages for class.

But I rarely read novels, and there’s a shamefully long list of heralded authors whose books I haven’t touched.  Dostoyevsky, Hemingway, Ellison, Faulkner, Fitzgerald, Nabokov.  Reading is time consuming and it requires patience.  It’s inefficient for learning, indirect in its benefits for useful application, and usually less entertaining than other things I could be doing.  I have a long record of reading the first chapters of a book before petering out.  My attention drifts, and by page 100 I can make an opinion on the writer’s style and ability; thus, I’ve already attained a lot of the cultural capital without having to put in the rest of the work.

There was one year where I was a strangely prolific reader.  I was ten years old, and I read the film novelization of Sleepy Hollow.  Then I read all many-hundreds-of-pages of The Green Mile.  K-Pax and Big Trouble.  These books were all of course in the process of becoming movies at the time, and movies really were--and always have been--my primary “artistic” interest. 

I remember my mom and I going to Borders in New Orleans.  I would look for all the books that I knew were becoming movies, read the first ten pages, and choose the one I liked best.  I couldn’t afford to buy the books so I would just sit at Borders and read a set number of pages each day.  Usually 50, once or twice I plowed through 100 I think.  This behavior died out, probably because I moved to Rio Rico, where the library was pathetic and there wasn’t a bookstore in which to sit and laze.

Every summer since I have tried to fix my reading deficit with some new approach.  Print magazines.  History books. Economics books.  Journals.  The focus of these strategies has been on the end result--being smarter and better.  This is of course a poor strategy for reading books, which require an appreciation of the journey simply because they take so long.

The impetus to try a new approach this summer came at 35,000 feet, flying from Istanbul to New York City.  A few hours before I had been trying to force my laptop back into my security-checked carry-on backpack.  For the life of me those zippers would not meet.  Something had to go.  Laptop? Camera? Folder with syllabi and frequent flier accounts?  Nope.  Instead I tossed Kurt Vonnegut.  Breakfast of Champions to be exact.

This alone did not determine my fate.  Transatlantic flights just about always have movies--if Bride Wars qualifies.  But early in the flight a pregnant woman asked to switch seats with me, and I said no.  OK, I had an aisle seat on an 11-hour flight; her tone was curt, and her husband already had one aisle seat--he should have switched with her, not me!  Well, as luck would have it the audio set-up in my seat didn’t work.  What I wanted more than anything was a book.  By the time I got from New York to Phoenix, an eternity later, I had polished off the first read of the summer.

This time I’m trying to re-capture my practice of ten years ago.  I’m working on entertaining, escapist reads and only tackling intellectual books of an appropriately short length.  I’ve decided to record the books I’m reading here, for two reasons.  First, announcing my intentions creates additional pressure not to quit.  Second, assuming anyone is reading my little inward-focused blog, it adds to the aforementioned “cultural capital” that I can gain from reading these books.  Yes, a full and honest awareness of my own cost-benefit analyses results in some shameless and silly strategic thinking.

So, what I've read so far (I'll update the list as I go):

1. What We Say Goes by Noam Chomsky (8/10 if you've never read Chomsky; 3/10 if you have)
2. The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo by Steig Larsson (9/10)
3. Runaway World by Anthony Giddens (8/10, if you're interested in globalization)
4. The Girl Who Played with Fire by Steig Larsson (7/10)
5. Solar by Ian McEwan (9/10)
6. The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest by Steig Larsson (8/10)
7. Chronicles: Volume One by Bob Dylan (7/10)
8. Ender's Game by Orson Scott Card (8/10)
9. The Forever War by Dexter Filkins (9/10, but read Tom Ricks' Fiasco instead)
10. The Giver by Lois Lowry (6/10)

Currently reading: Notes from the Underground by Fyodor Dosteyevsky

If you have any recommendations for what I should read next, tell me!