Keeping Track

Birders have Life Lists, why not readers?

Jun 21, 2023

As I mentioned in an earlier post, I started to keep track of what I read in 1979 (sheet of yellow tablet pinned to the wall). Seemed like a good idea.

But why?

Thoughts:

I have a good memory for book titles/authors (songs/bands, etc.) but time throws me. Once an event ends, it settles into the silt of memory where I'll never find it again without help. Keeping an external record of my reading life is practical—it's about pinpointing, retrieval.

But it's also a history of my curiosities—where they went, how they evolved. For instance, the dive I took into the social/political history of New England after discovering that scads of my forebears had come ashore there in the 1600s.1 Or, moved by images of the 1930s Dust Bowl, reading about the cadre of photographers Roy Stryker assembled at the Farm Security Administration—Dorothea Lange, Walker Evans, Gordon Parks, and others—and how this work emanated from FDR’s New Deal.2

And the master list gives an aerial shot of who I am as a reader now vis-à-vis who I was at points in the past (more on this in a moment).

I used to love Garrison Keillor's ads for Powdermilk Biscuits . . . they give shy persons the strength to get up and do what needs to be done. The folksy tone was schtick, but I liked the ethic underneath: pay attention, rise to the occasion, get off your butt and take care of what's yours to care for.

I began to see my reading life through that lens—as an entity, a thing I was responsible for, a thing to work on. In that light, not keeping track felt sloppy, disrespectful.

But what does it mean to work on your reading life?

The 25 years I lived in Western Montana were pre-Kindle. The idea that you could download virtually any book in a few seconds, cheaply (or free if off-copyright or borrowed from, for instance, the Seattle Public Library) was beyond imagination. Thus, many of the novels I read came from chance encounters at the Flathead County Library's new books display. Despite a few duds, serendipity brought me:

Nebraska [stories], Ron Hansen, 1989
That Night, Alice McDermott, 1987
Making Hay [nonfiction], Verlyn Klinkenborg, 1986
Swimming To Cambodia [monolog], Spalding Gray, 1985
Rough Strife, Lynn Sharon Schwartz, 1980

And a slew of others.

Later, as I aged and began to believe my life might actually be finite, I started to view my reading as a life-long work-in-progress, a canvas to fill however I saw fit.

So what did I want on it, this master canvas?

This is what I realized:

I didn't want it to be devoid of "the classics"—books I'd gleefully skipped when younger. To put it another way: The reader I wanted to be ought to have read War and Peace and Jane Eyre and Middlemarch—even The Count of Monte Cristo and Treasure Island, Frankenstein, etc.3
The list embodies an idea I'd tried to impress on writing students: Voice is king. Voice is the "mind of the story" manifested in language, the product of a writer's one-of-a-kindness, or what I call personal strangeness. And if that’s true, then your list is a really list of choices: this book, not that one, over and over and over, creating a portrait as individual as a fingerprint.
For it to be truthful, my list should be something of a crazy quilt—high art and low art side by side; insider art, transgressive art; plain-spoken art and ridiculous-ly ornate art; real-world art, alternate-universe art . . .
And, finally, it should reveal how I’ve changed as a reader over time, that I have a more urgent desire to hear what writers in other corners of the globe are saying4, a greater openness to writers from earlier planes of time5, and, most happily, my gradual emancipation from the works of straight white American men.

Colonial New England:

Mayflower, Nathaniel Philbrick, 2006
Stone By Stone: The Magnificent History in New England's Stone Walls, Robert M Thorson, 2002
Hands and Hearts: A History of Courtship in America, Ellen K. Rothman, 1984
A Little Commonwealth: Family Life in the Plymouth Colony, John Demos, 1970
The Crucible, Arthur Miller, 1953
The Devil in Massachusetts, Marion L. Starkey, 1949
Home Life in Colonial Days, Alice Morse Earle, 1898
Letters from an American Farmer, J. Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur, 1782
Of Plymouth Plantation, William Bradford, written 1630-1651

FSA photographers:

The Next Greatest Thing: Fifty Years of Rural Electrification in America, Patrick Dahl and Richard A. Pence, 1984
Dust Bowl Diary, Ann Marie Low, 1984
Five Photo-Textual Documentaries from the Great Depression, John Rogers Puckett, 1984
Portrait of a Decade: Roy Stryker and the Development of Documentary Photography in the Thirties, Forrest Jack Hurley, 1972

Another clip from the essay "Oblivion":

In college and the first years afterward, I gobbled up the work of writers who came of age after WWI—the expats, Fitzgerald and Hemingway, Henry Miller, and others like Nathanael West who were off to the side of literature’s main thoroughfare. I wanted writers who rejected the conventional wisdom, who saw through it to truer truths; I wanted my reading to be hip. I read Siddhartha and Steppenwolf, I read Cat’s Cradle and The Crying of Lot 49. I read The Tin Drum, The Stranger. Dharma Bums and Trout Fishing in America, Catch-22, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, Naked Lunch. Tom Robbins, Robert Coover, Joan Didion, Donald Barthelme, Raymond Carver. I read Zen and Art of Motorcycle Maintenance and The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test and Carlos Castaneda. At some point, I discovered that science fiction wasn’t, in fact, low-brow crap; I read Stranger in a Strange Land and Dune, then Ursula Le Guin, William Gibson. Ditto for crime novels: Raymond Chandler, Ross Macdonald, Elmore Leonard, Jim Crumley, etc. Eventually, I found my way to Garcia Marquez and Cormac McCarthy, Toni Morrison, and Faulkner.

However: no Chekhov, no Henry James, no Edith Warton, no Dickens, no George Eliot, no Victor Hugo or Alexandre Dumas (père or fils), no Zola or Balzac, no Austen, no Brontës, no James Fenimore Copper, no Maria Edgeworth, no Fielding, no Defoe. I was thirty-eight when I read Madame Bovary, forty-nine when I read Germinal and Moby Dick, sixty-three when I read Great Expectations.

The question is why. Why so resistant, so dismissive? Why had I drawn my horizon line so close to me? Arrogance of youth? Out with the old! Eighteenth and Nineteenth century poetry, especially, I found desperately cloying, the diction alone insufferable. It seemed to have nothing to do with me. My appetite was for the sleek and direct and forward-leaning. I wanted in on that in the worst way.

In Fiction in Translation [1] [https://longd.substack.com/p/fiction-in-translation-1], I mentioned Ann Morgan's project, A Year of Reading the World. Here's the link again:

https://ayearofreadingtheworld.com

This was the seed of Reading Back in Time.

https://longd.substack.com/p/davids-insane-reading-project

Ongoing Projects:

a) Shelter from the Storm:

Here's the concept: Each of us has a small cache of books we know and esteem that even other readers like us likely don't know—our discoveries, books we feel a special need to keep out of the clutches of oblivion. I invite you to recommend one.

The details:

One per subscriber [for now].
Tell us why, in one sentence.
When there's enough for a list, I'll post.
You can have your name attached, or not—up to you.

b) Birth Year Project: A standing invitation

You supply your birth year [in a comment]; I'll respond with a short list of books published that year—the popular/well-known titles first, then some books I'd recommend. If your year's already been used, fret not; I'll do a fresh one.

Extra credit: You read one of the books (ideally one you're unfamiliar with), then tell me what you thought. If we get enough of these, I'll aggregate and post.