THE READING PROJECT LIMPS ALONG, AND OTHER STORIES

One of the things I love most about blogs is how they provide a forum for people to take on crazy projects and record their progress for others to follow. Want to see someone cook every recipe in Mastering the Art of French Cooking or The French Laundry Cookbook? Walk every street in Manhattan? Spend a month living without post-1950s technology? There’s a blog for that. And while there’s nothing crazy about trying to read every book you own, I’d like the Reading Project to follow that model: a gauntlet to throw down for myself, a way to document my endeavor, a means of holding myself accountable. It worked OK last year, and even at the beginning of this year, I got a lot of mileage out of my struggles with Mansfield Park and The Living. But, let’s face it, this year’s list was more or less doomed from the get-go: too long, too repetitive (three Dahls, four Hammetts, four Wodehouses, and, my god, all of Sherlock Holmes?), a bit less meaty, maybe—full of things I solidly liked, but didn’t passionately love or hate. At times it felt like more of an endurance challenge than an intellectual one. I wanted to add a little discipline to my reading, but I didn’t want to feel so chained. I feel somewhat embarrassed about this, but am I really so compulsive that I need to make excuses to myself for not completing a project I assigned myself in the first place? Do I really need to be the valedictorian of online self-improvement projects?

I’ve already done a little damage control to the Reading Project 2007 list this year, but now I’m seriously retrenching. After reading the requisite number of pages proportionate to my age, as dictated by the Nancy Pearl Rule of 50, I’m now allowed to say “Life’s too short to keep trying to read Stanley Park.” It bored me and I’m not going to finish it. I’m not even going to start The Girl in Hyacinth Blue, which I only own because A’s mom gave me a signed copy (signed by the author, that is, not A’s mom); it can keep sitting in the “to read someday” pile atop my bookcase. And there’s no way in hell all that Conan Doyle’s getting read this year. I do pledge to read the last Hammett book and the other two Wodehouses, though.

When I abandoned the sinking Reading Project, I hit the library catalog with wanton abandon. It must have been just before lunch, too, because everything I put on hold was a food book. Thanks to my inability to remember that if I put a bunch of books on hold at the same time, they’re all likely to arrive at the same time, now I’m binging on them. In the past month I’ve read:

• How to Read a French Fry: And Other Stories of Kitchen Science, by Russ Parsons (Meh. It’s a good book, and useful if you want to learn about the fundamentals of cooking, but not a lot of it was news to me and I didn’t find it inspiring. That doesn’t mean that his follow-up about fruits and veggies, How to Pick a Peach, isn’t sitting on my nightstand right now, though.)

• The Amateur Gourmet: How to Shop, Chop, and Table-Hop Like a Pro, by Adam D. Roberts (Based on this blog. Again, I didn’t feel as though I learned a lot, but I like the writer’s voice and savored the book for its entertainment value. Recommended.)

• Alone in the Kitchen With an Eggplant: Confessions of Cooking for One and Dining Alone, edited by Jenni Ferrari-Adler (I always enjoy an anthology, I’m a big fan of eating alone, and anyway, I had to read it, since the title is lifted from one of my fave food writers, Laurie Colwin. Some of the essays were throwaways, but most were interesting and a couple were standouts, particularly one from Onion and Daily Show writer Ben Karlin, and another from Steve Almond that made me think I really should read more stuff by him—I liked Candyfreak, after all.)

• Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life, by Barbara Kingsolver (I just started it today, and so far it’s basically a recap of The Omnivore’s Dilemma, but I expect the personal narrative to take over soon and make me wish I could move to a farm in Appalachia to raise my own vegetables and chickens.)

The book I enjoyed most was not actually a food book: Eat, Pray, Love by Elizabeth Gilbert. I’m a bit behind with this—I think it’s been on the paperback best-seller list for thirtysomething weeks, which means it probably first came out in 2005—but as usual, when books receive a lot of buzz I like to circle them warily for a few years before maybe, grudgingly, deciding to sit down and read them. (Trendseeking reader I ain’t.) Subtitled One Woman’s Search for Everything Across Italy, India, and Indonesia, this book sounded suspiciously, Oprah-ishly self-helpy. But my parents recommended it, and I kept seeing it everywhere, and it did have “Eat” in the title, so I picked it up. And wouldn’t you know it, it’s great. I’ve read a lot of food books, a lot of travel books, and a lot of memoirs about people “finding themselves,” often through undertaking some crazy project (yes, there are those crazy projects again—and yes, a lot of those books are blog spinoffs), and I freely admit that all these genres can get unbearably cheesy when followed ad nauseum. I was sure this book was going to be “Blah blah the Italian people are so passionate and boy, they really know how to eat and blah blah I found meditation and enlightenment in India and blah blah blah look how travel has healed my soul.” What sets this book apart is how well it’s written and how completely true it rings. I’d kill to write like this: so funny, so painfully sincere, so—there’s no other word for it—deep. Gilbert reminds me of Anne Lamott in that she somehow manages to write about spirituality in a way that’s beautiful and honest, but never fluffy or new-agey. It's totally bullshit-free, which I think is hard to do when writing about religion, because we all want to suck up to that higher power a little.

I’m not saying “This book changed me forever” or “This is my new favorite book,” but it reminded me that there’s more to life than lists and pasta, and I appreciated that. Maybe it’s just timing, that this book was just what I needed right now, but I found it deeply refreshing and reassuring. I read so many books and enjoy them in the moment, but they only seem skim over the top layer of my brain, and when I set them aside I forget them. Every time I read a book that really sticks with me, I’m blown away—grateful and almost disbelieving. It feels like the first time, every time.