I have been keeping a list of all the books I read since I was 14, in part as a way to check that I am reading every year as much as I think I should. I learned from an article I found last Summer in El País that I am a ‘super-reader’, that is to say, a reader who goes through 100 books a year. I didn’t comment then on that piece, because I was aghast by the negative comments it drew, with many persons criticising ‘super-readers’ for being either liars or superficial page-turners with little actual awareness of the books we consume (we’re neither).
Anyway, I digress. The issue I am discussing today is that it is increasingly harder for me to meet my 100-books yearly target because I am abandoning more and more books in mid-read. I am wondering this year whether I should keep a register, too, of the books I abandon, as the pile of DNF (‘did-not-finish’) volumes is growing all the time, and also because in some cases (very few…) a second chance has worked.
I am not sure why I am leaving so many books unfinished, when I happen to be a rather omnivorous reader, of the kind who reads the cereal box labels. At any rate, since I am abandoning so many volumes, perhaps one for each four books I finish (so, about 25 a year or more), I have become very cautious as a book buyer. I mostly purchase printed books which I have already read (I usually borrow them from diverse libraries), and the novels I write about, but I no longer gamble my money away as I used to do inspired by sheer curiosity. I carefully pre-select my reading, keeping links from newspapers and magazine reviews, or from GoodReads, and avoid all temptation to rush off to Amazon. The exception, logically, are the copyright-free older volumes I can download from a variety of sites such as Project Guttenberg, Archive.org, and so on.
I have, no doubt, grown generally impatient these days. A major reason, clearly, is that I am writing a book on masculinity in SF by men which requires that I read many novels, most of them quite long. I have already read all the novels I am dealing with (around 50) but I need to re-read them, which, logically, is consuming much of my reading time. I cannot be always reading pencil in hand and making notes, and I tend to gravitate for pleasure towards books which have nothing to do with SF. The problem, as I note, is that unless they are very good works I feel that they are making me waste my time. I need to feel engaged and avoid the awkward impression that I am plodding on, rather than enjoying myself. I am loving very much the SF novels I am reading for the book, and it feels weird to be reading for pleasure volumes I enjoy less. It is, actually, beginning to worry me that I am keeping all my patience and disciplined reading habits for the novels I write about, while losing the ability to be patient with the books I cannot ‘use’ for work. I am writing this in case other academics have gone through the same process but we are not discussing it.
Funnily, whereas I have no problems engaging with the characters in the fiction I read for work (either for my own research or because my tutorees are writing about it), it is increasingly harder for me to be interested in the characters of the other novels I read. I have, for instance, recently published an article on one of Dickens’s wonderfully drawn secondary characters, “Jaggers the Plotter and the Pretty Child: Masculine Vulnerability to Beauty in Great Expectations” (Dickens Quarterly 40.4, December 2023, 457-475), but I find myself often annoyed by many other characters I read about. I start reading but suddenly I ask myself “who are these people and why should I care?” I have, for instance, just started reading Dennis Lehane’s Small Mercies (2023) and I am really struggling to care for the protagonist, Irish-American Mary Pat Fennessy, after just a couple of chapters. I chose this novel because I loved Lehane’s Gone, Baby Gone and Mystic River (not Shutter Island… too contrived) and because it has a whooping 4.3 rating at GoodReads. Yet, I am not particularly looking forward to continue reading; sorry Mary Pat.
Perhaps I am just ageing, and getting more impatient because I do not know how much longer I will be able to read, and life is too short for bad books as they say. I wonder, though, whether GoodReads might have something to do with all this. I do not always choose my readings after checking their GoodReads ratings, but I have got the very bad habit of checking what other readers have written the moment my interest wanes. I learned the expression DNF from GoodReads in fact, first mistaking it for DGF (‘don’t give a f—k’), which is hilarious if you think about it. My impression is that negative reviews are more accurate than positive reviews, so the moment I come across a DNF comment (or an ‘it doesn’t get better in the second half’ type of complaint) the book that is boring me that day is doomed. My fellow readers know best, and they are always more candid than media reviewers, hence my trust in them.
I have even considered whether I am simply less interested in reading. Could it be the case that, against what I believed when I was an enthusiastic undergraduate signing up for English Studies at the tender age of 18, reading is not a lifelong passion? I have lost, for instance, the appetite for bookshops, getting all my books from Amazon, or libraries, as I have noted. Books, with their small print and sheer weight if they pass the 300-page barrier, feel uncomfortable, which is in total contradiction with the pleasure I get from my own books. Here’s the last one: Passionate Professing: The Context and Practice of English Literature, with its lovely cover, and its beautiful edition. Perhaps, that’s another caveat, the more I write the less I like reading, one of those absurdities life is so full of but that might make some sort of sense.
To consider another possibility, my increasing impatience with current works might have to do with their falling standards, and the awkward problem of hype. Since marketing has been swallowing up plenty of honest reviewing (both in the journalistic media and in the social media), and professional criticism no longer is what it used to be, there is a constant flood of bad writing being sold as the next best thing. I swear that if I see one more book praised as a New York Times bestseller, I will scream! This suspicion that my dwindling commitment as a reader is overlapping with a time of shallow writing has indeed crossed my mind, if only because I am having the same problem as a cinema spectator, like so many other people all over the planet. I have come to the conclusion that there are not enough good films for the 365 days of the year, not even for 20, and, likewise, there seem to be a lack of good books to fill in my reading addiction.
There is also a point in life after which I am less attracted by fictional, invented experience and prefer learning, either from non-fictional personal experience or from hard facts. I have already commented on how in the last few years I have come to prefer non-fiction to fiction, and I realise that most of the books I am abandoning are novels. I have certainly given up on a number of non-fiction books, mostly disjointed memoirs with the wrong tone or volumes too dense in fact for me to enjoy. I gave up, for instance, on Sylvia Nassar’s A Beautiful Mind, the biography of Nobel Prize winner John Nash, because I could not follow the passages describing Nash’s brilliant mathematical research. Yet, on the whole, I stick to non-fiction and have more trouble sticking to fiction, from which I seem to be learning less and less. Particularly, the mundane kind. I recently started a novel by a promising young Catalan woman author, but her plot was so close to every day life that I just gave it up. It was neither entertaining nor didactic.
Perhaps this is what it all boils down too: I am finding it increasingly difficult to find current quality novels that are entertaining and didactic, and, of course, well written. I know that I could try filling in the gigantic gaps in my reading: Proust, other major French writers, the Russians, so many Italians, more Anglophone transnational authors and, indeed, lots of Spanish and Catalan novelists. I am not, however, speaking of taking a crash course on world Literature but of enjoying more often that wonderful feeling of keeping your eyes glued to a text for hours, forgetting the world exists. Looking at the list of 92 books I read in 2023, I thoroughly enjoyed 21, which is not bad, but this means that 71 were just goodish or even bad. 25 more, as I have noted, remain unfinished. It’s not good enough at all, and 2024 has started in an even worse vein.
First World problems, I know…