THE POLYSYLLABIC SPREE

So suddenly I’m addicted to reading. OK, I was always addicted, but now I’m like the smack addict who has to start shooting up into her earlobes or between her toes or wherever (sorry, all I vaguely know about heroin I learned from movies), and when I’m not reading I might as well be seeing that creepy baby crawling on the ceiling and spinning its head all the way around, because I am that distracted by the desire to be reading. In addition to Assassination Vacation and The Men Who Stare at Goats, last week I also read the newest No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency book, In the Company of Cheerful Ladies (those books are always light on plot, but they make me happy); and Ruth Reichl’s newest memoir, Garlic and Sapphires, about her career as the restaurant critic for the New York Times. You know how much I love reading food books (especially reading about food while actually eating food, and I do much of my reading while eating breakfast and lunch), and this one was delicious. Her tales of having to dress up in elaborate disguises (entire new personas, really) to avoid getting special treatment when dining out were fascinating, and the food descriptions were delicious.

Then I read a very appropriate little book, The Polysyllabic Spree, a collection of Nick Hornby’s columns from The Believer in which he simply writes about the books he’s bought and read each month. I could pretty much read Hornby writing about watching paint dry (except I hated his most recent novel, How to Be Good, and so I’m slightly apprehensive about the forthcoming one), but in particular I love reading his criticism—even if he’s talking about a book I’ve never read or a song I’ve never heard. I folded down so many corners of pages with great quotes on them, the book looks like I’ve been chewing on it. I nodded right along with this:

I don’t reread books very often; I’m too conscious of both my ignorance and my mortality….But when I tried to recall anything about [a certain favorite book] other than its excellence, I failed…. And I realized that, as this is true of just about every book I consumed between the ages of, say, fifteen and forty, I haven’t even read the books I think I’ve read. I can’t tell you how depressing this is. What’s the fucking point?

Although I like that a few months later, he decides, “if I’ve forgotten everything I’ve ever read then I can read some of my favorite books again as if for the first time.” I also liked this:

Being a reader is sort of like being president, except reading involves fewer state dinners, usually. You have this agenda you want to get through, but you get distracted by life events, e.g., books arriving in the mail/World War III, and you are temporarily deflected from your chosen path.

This is precisely how I feel right now (well, how I always feel, but now more acutely). There are so many separate reading initiatives I’d like to embark upon—rereading my favorite books I can’t remember, reading the books I own but haven’t read, reading big fat classics I’ve shamefully missed, reading the complete works of authors I’ve sampled and liked. But then they keep putting out these shiny new books, and I put them on hold, and the library brings them to me. I’ve decided to try to cut back on my library use (except for my most coveted items), so I can concentrate on the first two initiatives above—but then the hold list keeps disgorging new trinkets (including this entire recent spate of books) that have to be read immediately, and other things get tossed aside. Right now I’ve got two more books in at the library and five more on hold, but when that subsides, I’m hoping to finally read A’s favorite book, Lamb, and satisfy my hankering to revisit some old kids’ books, because summer makes me want to read the kind of book I can finish in one sitting.