[Though] I read at least a hundred books a year, and often twice that number, I always end up on New Year's Eve feeling I have accomplished nothing.
***
I have never squandered an opportunity to read. There are only twenty-four hours in the day, seven of which are spent sleeping, and in my view at least four of the remaining seventeen must be devoted to reading.
Of course, four hours a day does not provide me with nearly enough time to satisfy my appetites. A friend once told me that the real message Bram Stoker sought to convey in Dracula is that a human being needs to live hundreds and hundreds of years to get all his reading done; that Count Dracula, misunderstood bookworm, was draining blood from the porcelain-like necks of ten thousand hapless virgins not because he was the apotheosis of evil but because it was the only way he could live long enough to polish off his reading list.
If it were possible, I would read books eight to ten hours a day, every day of the year. Perhaps more. There is nothing I would rather do than read books. This is the way I have felt since I started borrowing books from a roving bookmobile at the tender age of seven. In the words of François Rabelais: I was born this way.
***
Until recently, I was not aware of how completely books dominate my physical existence.
Only when I started cataloguing my possessions did I realize that there are books in every room in my house, save for the bathrooms, and books in all three rooms in my office suite. ... Books are in my line of vision at all hours of the day and night.
***
With few exceptions, I write my name, the date of the purchase, and the city where the book was purchased on the inside flap of my books. If I have not written my name inside, it is because I have already decided that the book is not worth keeping.
JOE QUEENAN
***
I do not accept reading tips from strangers, especially from indecisive men whose shirt collars are a dramatically different colour from the main portion of the garment. I am particularly averse to being lent or given books by people I may like personally but whose taste in literature I have reason to suspect, and perhaps even fear.
I dread that awkward moment when a friend hands you the book that changed his or her life, and it is a book that you have despised since you were fourteen. People fixated on a particular book cannot get it through their heads that, no matter how much this book might mean to them, it is impossible to make someone else enjoy A Fan's Notes or The Sot-Weed Factor or The Little Prince or Dune, much less One Thousand and One Places You Must Visit Before You Meet the Six People You Would Least Expect to Bump into Heaven. Impossible. Not without assistance from the Stasi.
I plan to go as I have lived: with a book in my hands. And not just any book by anybody. No, if there's one writer who can ease aeronautical timor mortis [the author is flying from Washington, D.C., to Chicago], it's Dr Pelham Grenville Wodehouse, Plum to his friends, and the creator of Jeeves, Psmith, Madeline Bassett, Uncle Fred and a body of fiction that has brought more joy to readers than even the Kama Sutra of Vatsayana. When angels in heaven want a book to read, they buy a paperback of The Code of the Woosters, then lean back into a cloudbank and sigh with pleasure over sentences like these:
"He, too, seemed disinclined for chit-chat. We stood for some moments like a couple of Trappist monks who have run into each other by chance at the dog races."
"Into the face of the young man who sat on the terrace of the Hotel Magnifique at Cannes there had crept a look of furtive shame, the shifty hangdog look which announces that an Englishman is about to talk French."
"Years before, and romantic as most boys are, his lordship had sometimes regretted that the Emsworths, though an ancient clan, did not possess a Family Curse. How little he had suspected that he was shortly to become the father of it."
And Lord did I push, for three more hours
I pushed, I pushed so hard I shat,
Pushed so hard blood vessels burst
in my neck and in my chest, pushed so hard
my asshole turned inside out like a rosebud...
So I ended up feeling as though I knew them both better anyway — indeed, I can think of one or two of my stuffier compatriots who'd argue that I now know more than I need to know. (Is now the appropriate time, incidentally, to point out the main advantage of adoption?) If I had never met mother or daughter, then these lines would have made me wince, of course, but I doubt if they would have made me blush in quite the same way; maybe one should know poets either extremely well or not at all.
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| JUST A FEW OF THE HUNDREDS OF BOOKS I'VE BOUGHT FOR THE COMMITS LIBRARY. |
