It’s eight and a half months into my Reading 2007 project, so I think that a status report is long overdue. The idea, for those of you who haven’t been following the blog over the last year, is that I write a mini-review of every book I read this year. I’ve managed to keep that up for all thirty-eight books that I’ve read so far, sort of. Most of the “mini-reviews” have wound up being rather disorganized and somewhat disconnected from any particular critical stance. And they also tend to be written within a half hour of my having finished reading the book, and rarely do they take more than a half hour to write. It was never my intention to be so slapdash (I swear I’m capable of more considered judgements), but I think I actually prefer it this way. I never intended this site to be a place for my deepest or most profound thoughts, and I certainly don’t want it to turn into a forum for academic writing. For one thing, I’m notoriously slow when it comes to formal writing, and for another I’d rather that sort of work show up in other venues, preferably venues in which I’m being paid. I’d prefer this blog be more casual, and it has been. So for now on I think I’ll scrap the notion of “mini-reviews”. My posts about specific books will not change any, I think it would just be better to think of them as impressions or gut reactions.
I’m also quite behind on my reading. I used to read between seventy and ninety books a year, and right now I’m not even on track to hit sixty. I suppose this isn’t a bad thing per se, but I certainly feel like I’m cheating myself somehow. It feels like the longer I’m out of touch with critical/academic world, the harder it is for me to focus for long periods of time on a given text, the more things like excitement and adventure matter, often at the expense of intellectual pleasure. They are not mutually exclusive pleasures, of course, but they are quite different kinds of pleasure. I’ll leave it to the individual reader to determine which is the greater, if they believe such an assessment can be made honestly.
Also, and I’m going to give this subject its own paragraph because it bothers me so much, I find that I’m very conscious about what authors I’m reading. Far more so than before I made my reading choices so self-consciously public. Am I reading enough women authors? Enough authors of colour? Enough Canadians? I’ve never seriously considered these issues before, in fact I dismissed them as completely irrelevant. The colour of an author’s skin, their birthplace, or whatever interesting bits they may have between their legs always struck me as completely irrelevant to whether or not I would read their books. But the blogosphere (I can’t tell you the self-loathing that accompanied my typing that word) seems to think such things are important. Many of the blogs I read (Bookslut, Bookninja, Edward Champion’s The Return of the Reluctant, The Elegant Variation) seem to think these are issues of paramount of importance. They look at the bylines in magazines and breakdown gender and ethnic percentages. They look at the juries and winners of major prizes, pay attention to who gets more column inches. (Never mind that they don’t look at any considerations beyond the blunt notion of prejudice for any numerical inequality.) I honestly don’t give a shit, so long as I get to read good books. But. I feel like, if I read more books by men than women, more books by caucasians than by people of colour, more books by Brits and Americans than by Canadians, I may somehow be judged by readers of this blog to be a misogynist, a racist, or in some way a traitor to my culture. I could point out that my two favourite novels are both written by women, and that one of them is Canadian. I could point out that of my four favourite living Canadian writers, two are black, and one is a Jewish woman. The problem is that making these statements would genuinely make me feel like I was trying to hide something, or that somehow reading more books by men than women in 2007 is a misogynist act. It isn’t, and I don’t have to defend my reading choices. I think, ultimately, that choosing my reading material based on considerations other than “do I think I will enjoy this book?” to be demeaning to myself and to the authors I read. If I pick up a book by Zadie Smith because she is a woman of colour rather than because I think I will enjoy her book, I feel like I am implying that her skin colour and fiddly bits are more important than her skill with words (I chose Smith as an example because she has been written about as a significant female author and as a significant author of colour, but I read On Beauty last year, and loved it, because it sounded like a damned fine book, and for no other reason). That is an implication I am unwilling to make. I know that if someone picked my work because I have white skin and a penis, and not because they think my work will be enjoyable, I would be insulted. Now, my experiences as a white male in our society may influence my subject matter or even what sort of writing styles I may experiment with (I may be less likely to indulge in certain kinds of gender ambiguities, or certain kinds of rhythm), but those things have no bearing on whether or not my work is any good. At any rate, I don’t like thinking of these issues when I choose my reading material, and it pisses me off that I am feeling this kind of peer pressure, even if it is indirect.
No matter what happens, I think that when 2007 is over, I’m going to start again with a similar project for 2008. Lastly, I’ll just give you a taste of some of the books I have on deck.
- Underworld, by Don DeLillo (I’ve been reading a lot of stuff being written about this book, and I want to chime in, but not until I read the damned thing.)
- The Recognitions, by William Gaddis
- White Teeth, by Zadie Smith
- V., by Thomas Pynchon
- The Republic of Love, by Carol Shields
- The Big Sleep, by Raymond Chandler
- Childhood, by André Alexis
Thanks for reading!
