1.
“We’re closing in on a deal,” my agent told me on the phone. “I’m just turning him upside-down now and shaking him for loose change.”
It was midday on a Monday in early August of the year 2000. The Nasdaq, rested from its breather in the spring, was sprinting back up over 4,000 toward its March peak.
Vice President Gore, demolishing the
Bush son’s early lead, was pulling even in the polls. TV commercials depicted placid investors being wheeled on gurneys into operating rooms, stern-faced doctors diagnosing their patients with dire cases of money coming out the wazoo.
The previous Friday, bidding on my first novel had reached six figures, then paused for people to track down more cash. I’d later learn one editor spent the weekend trying to reach her boss on his Tanzanian vacation, finally getting through via the satellite phone of a safari boat on the Rufiji river, but that he wouldn’t OK a higher bid because he couldn’t get the manuscript in time.
I was 32. I’d never made over $12,000 in a year.
I’d signed on with my agent only a couple of weeks earlier. He was about my age, a clean-cut, preppie-looking guy named Bill, just making the transition from being an assistant to having clients of his own. He’d walked me through an open-floored office, agents and subagents stepping out from behind their iMacs and glass walls to shake my hand. We’d sat down in a sunny conference room, and after a few minutes I knew he was thoroughly attuned to my work; moreover he’d put his finger on a couple of remaining weak points, about which I agreed entirely and was eager to go home and address.
“How soon do you think an editor might read it?” I asked. I’d met with another interested agent a few days before. She’d told me it was the summer and things were slow, but my novel was so good—and so timely—that she knew an editor at Grove she was almost sure would read it in as little as four to six weeks.
Bill looked out the window, thoughtful. “It’s the summer, things are slow. Everyone’s hungry right now. We’ll give them the manuscript to take with them to the Hamptons to read over the weekend. Then the following week, you’ll meet with them and we’ll see who we like.”
It might have taken a week for the editors to read rather than a weekend. But the week after that I had meetings with editors scheduled every day.
This was, perhaps—after eight years as an itinerant grad student, sending out writing and waiting months to receive boilerplate rejection slips—somewhat overwhelming. By the first meeting, at a well-respected independent house, an all-too-familiar seasick feeling was coming on, as the editor introduced me around. Somehow over the last few days, nearly everyone in the office had read the manuscript. An assistant told me she loved how the metropolis my novel was set on the slopes of a smoking volcano, how no one who lived there ever brought it up or seemed to care. She asked me if I’d ever been to Hawaii, where she was from. Everybody there seemed smart, energetic, likable, young. I tried to smile as they crowded around me, aware I wasn’t saying much, got through my goodbyes, and made it to the bathroom, where I shat blood, and managed not to throw up.
The following morning I was too sick to make the next meeting at all. I was staying for the summer in a rent-stabilized East Village sublet I’d found, narrow as a submarine. The regular occupant was a special ed teacher, an aspiring playwright and outsiderish painter of traumatic childhood events. His mammoth canvases stared down from the peeling plaster around his bed, captioned with black-painted script at the bottom. “And then June cut her leg” featured an overweight girl in a swimsuit with a bloody gash above her knee and a wide howling mouth. “Tommy liked to shoot rats from the porch” depicted a ramshackle house at night, and an adolescent boy in an undershirt, his rifle barrel aimed straight at the viewer. Lying there with June’s scream and Tommy’s reddened eye taking a bead on me, I thought about how long I’d been living for this break, some hateful inner voice telling me it had all been too good to be true.
My younger brother, who lived in the neighborhood, came over with some anti-nausea medicine and sat with me, improvising a visualization exercise to calm my mounting panic. The exercise helped, and the massive doses of steroids I’d begun taking were kicking in. With the ulcerative colitis episode subsiding, I was able to make the rest of the meetings.
I felt like I saw half of the city that week—the inner half—every door previously closed to me suddenly thrown wide, like I could walk into any office on the island and start shaking hands. I was an overnight connoisseur of tome-filled lobbies and plunging city views. Most of the editors I was meeting, like my agent, were young—my age, my generation, elated to be finding one of their own. Each of them seemed to feel the book was saying something they themselves had been struggling to express; I felt as if I’d been childhood friends with them all. The last editor, Bill told me, was going to be a little older, in his mid-forties, one of the great editors of the era, in fact. Bill rattled off a list of the man’s authors, several of whom were heroes of mine. But one thing I should know—he was battling cancer. Doing well, though, word was. The prognosis, thank God, was good.
By that last meeting on Friday, the steroids and I were fully in our usual honeymoon period—nausea banished, colon stunned out of attacking itself, energy cranked enough to bestow a calm unstoppability while not yet at the level of sleeplessness or vicious mood swings. Whatever remaining woozy unease I was feeling was banished by the sight of
Robert Jones, who was so clearly sicker than me. Instead of making me wait in a lobby, he’d come down to meet me at the HarperCollins front desk, walking slightly stooped, his left arm held in protectively against himself.
“Excuse my pace,” he said, his tone somehow both deadpan and luxuriating in melodrama, “I recently had my left side removed.”
We shook hands and stepped outside so he could smoke a cigarette. In the course of our conversation, I asked about some of his more famous authors, expecting guarded and respectful replies, but he cut right to the juicy stuff, telling me how he practically had to move in with one author to help him get his book done, complaining how another refused to promote his books but would bend over backwards to hawk a movie version.
“I suppose these aren’t the kind of stories an editor should tell a young author whose novel he wants to acquire.” He regarded me merrily. “Don’t worry,” he said. “I’m not going to move in with you.”
I would have felt blessed to work with any of editors I’d met that week, but Robert was my first choice, and Bill’s as well. Robert, though, left nothing to chance. He was the highest bidder at auction, consenting to be turned upside-down and shaken for change. At day’s end, after Bill told me the final figure on the phone, I wandered numb out of the special ed teacher’s apartment and up St. Marks to the subway. I was having dinner with two of my closest friends from college, also aspiring writers, one of whom had been gifted by a grandparent a coupon good for two free entrees at a Ruth's Chris steakhouse, our plan being to split the cost of the third. I couldn’t bring myself to tell them how much money I’d just made. I said it was a lot. Then I kind of laughed. Then I said it was a whole lot. There was an uncomfortable silence as we all realized I wasn’t going to get more specific.
I didn’t tell my brother. I didn’t tell my parents, whose average income wasn’t much more than mine, all of us feeling that weirdness, that new distance of me not telling them. Part of the purpose of a large advance, I understood, was to gain a book publicity. But I told nearly no one. Instead, for weeks, I did math in my head. I subtracted my agency’s cut and divided the figure by the five long years I’d lavished on the book and came out with a perfectly reasonable—boring, even—middle-class salary. I divided it by the ten years since college I’d been writing, the result more lackluster still. I thought of acquaintances and friends of friends who’d been riding the dotcom wave into stupefying wealth. I was basically a peasant, I reasoned. But one who could pay off his student loans. One in need of tax advice.
It was about a third of a million bucks.
2.
“Beautiful!”
“The white background.”
“The bone made of products.”
“And the cover itself, beneath the jacket. So colorful.”
It was true. The hardcover book, hot off the presses, was a work of art. I could barely pry my eyes from it as the HarperCollins marketing and publicity teams passed it around the conference table.
“Without the jacket, it looks like a textbook.”
“Like a marketing textbook!”
This was true, too. Beneath the white jacket, the cover—front, back, and spine—was a single, glossy photograph of a supermarket shelf, brimming with snack foods.
“We should market it to marketing classes,” said a marketer, to laughter and general accord.
I’d been at first worried what the marketers might think of my novel, exploring, as it did, certain complex emotions with regard to consumerism. But they were proving to be among the book’s biggest champions. They’d read it with attention and care, told me how moving they’d found it, how relevant and what was more, timely. The Diet Water. The rainforest fashions. The feeling that all this gorgeous, crazy decadence was about to blow. The marketing director said that reaching the end of a chapter on her way to work she’d looked up to realize she’d missed her subway stop.
I had the sense that they, the marketers, had been working nearly as lovingly on the book over the last few months as I had been. While I’d been going through the rounds of edits and copyedits and proofreading, they’d come up with a postcard campaign and a press kit, and made sure the otherwise austere galleys came wrapped, like presents, in that colorful supermarket shelf. It was now the summer of 2001, and so much had changed. The Bush son had won the national election by a vote of 5-4. The NASDAQ lay in smoke and ashes. On the evening news, dotcom workers with designer nerd glasses and odd, lingering smirks could be seen walking out of bankrupted startups, boxes in hand.
But the city once more was sunny and mild, and we’d all survived. I’d turned 33, filed my first accountant-assisted tax return. And my editor Robert was back from the brink of death. He’d come through the chemo and radiation and had been promoted to editor-in-chief. He’d edited two seasons’ worth of manuscripts, including my own—with great insight and gusto and even joy, judging from his running commentary in the margins. He wasn’t here at the marketing meeting, but we’d been assured that he was fine, on vacation in California, soaking up the waves. It might have been hard to believe, had I not seen him the month before in Chicago at the Book Expo, in a slick gray suit and a yellow tie, hair fully regrown, slightly flushed but otherwise in top form. He’d latched my elbow and directed my gaze to a thin curl of a woman hunched in a corner of the HarperCollins reception, scribbling on a pad.
“
Joyce Carol Oates,” he said. “One of my authors. She’s writing her next novel.”
“Here? At the party?”
“What are
you smiling at?” he exclaimed. “Where’s
your pad? What have
you given me lately?”
That afternoon, I was sat behind a table, where I signed galleys for the occasional book collector (“Don’t make it out to anyone,” they instructed, annoyed. “Just sign and date.”) or fan of the more established writers drifting over from the long lines nearby. Two tables down,
Clive Barker, in a silk shirt with the top four buttons undone and an iron cross hung from his neck, was calling for more tea.
“Do you know what ‘teabagging’ is?” he asked an elderly woman waiting in front of him with her open book, then proceeded to provide her an anatomically detailed explanation.
Barker was another of Robert’s authors, as was
Ann Patchett. I met them both later that night, at a dinner Robert had scheduled for the four of us, along with my girlfriend, and Clive’s muscular husband, at the five-star, immodestly-named Everest, done up in faux-zebra-skin chairs and perilously shard-heavy chandeliers.
“My newest star,” was the way Robert introduced me, sprinkling pixie dust. “And his lovely girlfriend.”
“We’re going to party all night,” Barker announced, in his ravaged, British rock star voice.
Patchett, conversely, expressed consternation that the dinner had been scheduled for 9:30, saying she never went to sleep later than eleven. Robert shot me a mischievous smile.
We didn’t stay out all night, but afterward, out in the empty downtown street, Clive and I lingered, wishing each other luck on our upcoming tours.
“Don’t let them put you in second rate hotels,” he said. “They’ll try to do that sometimes. And make them fly you first class. They’ve got the money—they’ll pretend they don’t, but they do.”
He got into his waiting car. I waved as it pulled out. Over dinner, he’d talked about the undead-themed videogame he and Electronic Arts had just put out. I knew I wouldn’t be asking HarperCollins for airplane upgrades anytime soon. Nonetheless, I was honored, a little awed, too, by this advice, from a certified star to—could I allow myself to entertain the notion?—a rising one.
On the occasional visit to my parents back in Brooklyn, my father, an actor who’d had a too-brief brush with the big time when he was younger, had taken to commenting on the performances of celebrities on talk shows for my benefit: who looked natural, who stiff, whose posture was slumped, voice was crimped.
Sharyn Rosenblum, my book’s vivacious, fire-haired, warrior-woman publicist, had been gauging my readiness as well. At the Expo, she’d put me in front of a reporter and watched with concern as I tried to explain my trendspotter-characters’ beliefs—how the culture was supersaturated with irony, how a strange, new, schizoid era of what they (and I) termed “postirony” was on the way—going into too much detail and well over soundbite-length. She’d taken me to a party in a sprawling hotel suite and introduced me to a
Fresh Air producer, neglecting to tell either of us who the other was, and watched us stand there trying to figure out why we were shaking hands.
Now, back in New York after the marketing meeting, she steered me into her office, where she and her equally vivacious protégé, Claire, became my personal media trainers, boxing coaches in pumps, firing off interview-from-hell questions:
“Why is the book so dark?” Sharyn asked. “Aren’t you worried about getting too trendy yourself?” And then: “What do you think of all this promotion and packaging and hype surrounding your book?”
The two of them studied me as I fumbled through my responses.
“Don’t say ‘um,’ so much,” Sharyn said.
“Or ‘you know,’” Claire said.
“I
don’t know,” Sharyn said. “You’ve got to tell me.”
“Don’t mumble," Claire said.
“If you don’t know what to say,” Sharyn said, “stall by saying, ‘That’s a very good question.’”
“‘Wow,’” Claire demonstrated. “‘Great question!’”
“See? It’s flattering too.”
Sharyn took me to a couple more parties in downtown lofts and steered me around, but mainly she was working on getting me ink. She thought there was good chance
People magazine would run a profile of me for their October issue, to coincide with my novel’s mid-September release. Meanwhile,
Details wanted to do a photospread. The idea was that I would pose in various haute-couture outfits, which would then be tagged in the captions, listing designers and prices.
“So it would be . . . an advertisement?” I asked her.
“Alex,” she said. “They’re bumping
Jimmy Carter to get you into the issue.”
I went on, for a minute or so, to question Sharyn about the wisdom of having the author of a trenchant novel about consumerism selling clothes in magazines. A week earlier, she’d come to me with a proposal from a major cigarette company to host parties for my book despite (or perhaps due to) a scene in it depicting a creepy rave sponsored by Camel. I’d politely nixed the cigarette deal, but it didn’t take much to convince me to do the photoshoot.
The
Details team met me at a trendy, white-vinyl-upholstered East Village bar they’d leased out for the day. Except for the lighting guy, a droll ponytailed German who looked to be about my age, they were all disconcertingly young, mid-twenties at most. I got the feeling they were assistants and interns getting their shot at a shoot of their own. I’d been carefully growing out my hair, hoping to counteract the staidness of my hardcover photo, in which I’d hoped to look unpretentious but just looked angry and square. But comparing my actual face to the one on that same picture from the press kit, the hair stylist shook her head and set about re-trimming my hair. They then dressed me, for no reason I could fathom, in 80’s garb—a dark suit jacket and a striped polo shirt with the collar flipped.
“It’s a funny book, right?” said the photographer. “So you should smile really wide.”
I’d never done this with my face before. Then again, I’d never worn a polo shirt. I tried. The result seemed to unsettle her, but she went on, undaunted.
“And jump off that bench.” She pointed. “And throw out your arms and kick up your heels.”
Off I went. From their expressions, I could infer what my own must have looked like: like I was being stretched on a rack.
“Eighties Man,” the German sardonically pronounced.
The other event at an East Village bar that summer was a pre-launch party for the novel which Sharyn had arranged.
“Great news,” she said on the phone the morning thereof. “It got picked up in the
Observer. They even ran an excerpt.”
It was the first piece of press the book had gotten. On my way to the party, I bought a copy:
How to market a book by a young Ivy League author whose prose thoroughly confuses you? Compare him to
Thomas Pynchon, cross your fingers and hope for the best, baby!
This was followed by an out-of-context sentence from a sex scene. Followed in turn by some other party one could go to instead.
Stricken, feeling like I’d been molested, I threw the paper away, took deep breaths, and entered the bar. At every table, and spaced every three feet down the bartop, lay photocopies of the article. A few early guests were perusing it. Sharyn came up to me, a whole stack of them in hand.
“Did you see it yet?” she asked.
“Did you? Did you read it?”
“So it’s a little snarky. They’re like that with everyone.” As my parents came through the door, she stuck copies into their hands.
I made a few small, wince-worthy blunders at the party, and spent too much time trying to impress a group of postcollegiate interns at
Charlie Rose who were clearly just there for the free drinks. But it served its purpose, and Sharyn seemed happy with how it went.
People was indeed going to run the profile. More good news followed, as the early reviews showed up in the trades—all of them glowing. It was really happening. Faced with the evidence, even that cynical little inner voice was finally starting to quiet.
The only dark spot was that Robert was back in the hospital. We were all told that it was just a minor setback and not to worry. Worried anyhow, I went to visit him. I’d been preparing myself, but the sight of him shocked me. He smiled, nervously. For the first time since I’d known him, he was at a loss for words.
“So how’s that vacation going?” I said.
He laughed, smile easing. “It was splendid up until two days ago.”
He’d been on a California beach, he went on to tell me, wading into the waves, when his lungs had begun filling with fluid.
To make up for his foreshortened vacation, we now took turns extolling the vaguely aquatic theme of the room, cataloging everything from the peaceful East River view to the aquamarine hue of the visitors’ couch to the waterworks of the lung machine itself, which, as we spoke, was sucking reddish liquid from his chest through a long plastic tube and into a burbling plastic tank at the foot of the bed. The lung problem, he said, was correctable by surgery. There was a chance it wouldn’t work, he admitted, and his eyes shone as he said it, but he’d come through worse. I asked if he had family coming, and he said he’d ordered his mother not to, figuring he’d be out of the hospital by the time she would have gotten here; and that besides, he had his authors to keep him entertained.
“So entertain me.” He made a gesture like asking a waiter for the check. “Write something!”
3.
Robert’s memorial service was held on September 10, 2001, eight days before my novel’s release. It was a star-studded, though brief, affair in the auditorium of a midtown social club. Afterward, Bill and I retreated to a low-key restaurant, Bill talking loudly about how fake the whole thing had been, how disgusted Robert himself would have been. Bill was outdrinking me but even so I was surprised how quickly he’d gotten drunk. He went to the bathroom for the second time and I ordered another drink, hoping to catch up. I almost wished, that afternoon, I could have been outraged over the loss of Robert, too, but really all I could feel was gushing gratitude, for having had the brief chance to have been the man’s friend, for the whole HarperCollins juggernaut he’d marshaled on my book’s behalf, for the simple fact that here I was, hanging out with my savvy, preppie friend and agent a week before my first novel’s release. It would be a long time before I’d learn that in the bathroom Bill was calling his dealer, arranging a buy; that when he hurriedly paid and left, it would be to smoke crack all night; that he’d keep right on using, and disintegrating, from there.
The next morning I was getting ready to leave my parents’ apartment in Brooklyn for the airport when my father turned on the radio. We climbed the fire escape to the roof and watched the first tower burn. A cloud of white pages had fluttered all the way across the river and overhead. I thought they might be messages from the terrorists, but when my father caught one, it was just legalese. Fearing the possibility of chemical weapons, we went back downstairs and watched the rest of the catastrophe on cable TV. With the first collapse, amid the senseless snuffing of all those lives and all the rest of the sickening loss, I registered a faint pop within, as everything I’d been filling my head with this last, banner year snapped away like an idle minute’s daydream.
“There goes your novel,” my father said, in a dry little voice I recognized anew.
I watched the second one fall, then went and lay down. My very loss was meaningless compared to those who’d lost for real. Then I went out and walked around, trying to volunteer for something like everyone else.
No sooner were the politicians and pundits and media makers back at their posts than they were retooling for the grim new era.
Roger Rosenblatt and
Graydon Carter proclaimed “the end of irony,” and good riddance. President Bush and
Mayor Giuliani exhorted citizens to patriotic acts of shopping. Flag-filled, “keep America rolling” commercials for cars and pickup trucks began rolling out over the airwaves. Few were in the mood for certain complex emotions with regard to consumerism, as felt by a group of fictional trendspotters making the best of their glittering, supercool, doomed little world.
A couple of reviews, over the coming weeks, deemed the book prophetic, though more didn’t fail to mention its unfortunate untimeliness, and even some of the raves read more like obituaries (“a sharply observant relic of the recent past”). I toured the country, observed by my fellow plane passengers with suspicion and occasionally returning the sentiment. Here and there bookstores offered a modest turnout; many were empty. In Seattle, I read with the writer
Rabih Alameddine, who’d been having a far worse time than me in the airports, and whose tour after that night was being canceled altogether. HarperCollins, in my case, cut its losses and pulled the second advertising round it had planned.
People magazine pulled my profile, because of its mention of a bomb scene in the novel, which they felt, under the present circumstances, might offend sensitive readers. The
Details photospread (mercifully, in this case) was reduced to a single page, a few lines about me and the novel running over a picture of the top half of my head, my eyes peeking over the bottom of the page—no 80s garb visible at all.
There were no national television appearances, but through sheer tenacity, Sharyn got me a couple of local cable spots in New Jersey and Connecticut, and I was determined to make her proud. I rode alone in a car service to the latter, a daytime talk show in a sound studio out in the middle of an industrial park, and waited to go on in a small green room with an Asian-American girl who played the cello. They called me up to the stage and sat me down with the host and hostess, their faces caked with makeup, which I found amusing until I looked up at the monitor and saw that onscreen they seemed rosily healthful, whereas I, sans makeup, looked either like I was bound for the crypt or had just risen from one. With only seconds to go before we went live, the hostess turned to me and said her first question was going to be what I had to say to people who were saying my novel was irrelevant.
I gave her my most winning smile. “How about a different first question?”
(All images courtesy the author)
It is difficult to describe how painful this is. I became a writer not just because I thought I had something to say, but because I love good writing. I care about good writing. I will go so far as to say that, for me, good writing has a moral dimension to it. A great novel like Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, or a revelatory story like James Joyce’s “The Dead” from Dubliners is like some incredibly fine moral scalpel that can slit me open, turn me inside out, and force me to feel the world in a raw, intimate way that only a great work of art can. A clumsy sentence or an insufficiently explored character in a place where that sort of thing isn’t supposed to occur — in a published novel, say, or a reputable literary magazine — feels not merely lazy or bad, but wrong.
I read 54 books this year, and I didn’t worry about how fast I read or how many books I had planned to read. I just took them as they came. Don’t have a goal other than just to enjoy what you are reading.
I read 42 books this year and I can safely say that I struggled through all but one of them. I’m still in my 20s, struggling to write well and I also find solace in reading. Like you, I keep telling myself that all the time I spend reading will help me be a better writer, but I’m beginning to wonder if it’s just something I tell myself so I won’t get too upset about not actually writing. In the meantime, reading is becoming tedious and I find myself abandoning books midway.
Why not join us at Goodreads for 2013: The Year of Reading Proust?
I agree with @Jack M.
Slow down and enjoy your reads. Slow down and enjoy your writing.
“…what you are really doing is finding a way to quantify your inner sense of self-worth.”
I began keeping track in 2011. I read 52 books in 2012 and 75 books the year before. My boyfriend and I are both avid readers. He probably read about half as many. We don’t have cable or children. We’re in our forties. We would rather read than watch the schlock on television. In the summer we prefer to ride our motorcycle or read than watch the schlock on television.
I keep track of my books with Goodreads; he does not. I don’t think I’m trying to quantify my self-worth. I’m nurturing my ability to think, not retarding it by watching bad television.
Excellent article – too many writers forget to read. Yet one needs to read to reach that level where you know the difference between a good and a bad book, between commercial literature and literary excellence. And I agree that once you’ve reached that stage you can slow down in your reading and start doing some serious writing. Your inner editor knows the difference and will help you improve your drafts!
But the inner editor also needs to be turned off when you write your first draft (sure it sucks, first drafts always do!) Then, for subsequent drafts, turn it on again and make sure you’ve forgotten about what you’ve read. You’re not going to imitate anyone, you’re going to be you. And to achieve that “voice” is only possible once you’ve “forgotten” everything you’ve read, all those hundreds of books that have only left vague traces in your subconscious…But without them, I’m convinced you can be a good commercial writer, you can’t ever be a great writer!
So good luck, Michael, can’t wait to read that masterpiece!
I’ve been keeping the list since 1967(with the same self-competition to hit 52 – my best is 80, having had many years at it, with steep dips). The list itself becomes sort of biographical after awhile – don’t stop!
It’ll begin to reveal subtle changes in interests and attitudes. I now find it also saves me time and money, allowing me to recall that I already read a book (sometimes a few times).
While I understand the overall point of this post, you lost me with this: “At one point, I tried to keep track of how many of the authors I read were non-white, but the racial demarcations became so tangled — what to make of Bliss Broyard, a white writer who wrote a book about her father, Anatole, who concealed his (nearly invisible) African-American heritage until his death? — that I gave up.”
You’re kidding me, right?? Why not just admit that the race of the authors just wasn’t that important to you? Of course, that could lead to the question of just how many nonwhite authors you DO read, and what that really says about your own literary credentials.
I really get this..I have committed to 4 different reading challenges this year..!
Thank you for writing this post and sharing that sentiment. It was like reading about myself. I’ll be looking out for more of your work.
I totally know what the author means in this piece- I spend HOURS on Goodreads, pruning my virtual bookshelves, painstakingly arranging and categorizing my books read and such. I feel the same way- that private glow of joy coming from knowing that you read a great many books this year, regardless of whether anybody actually knows or cares or whether or not it helped you as a writer.
I’m thinking, for the record, that maybe there’s nothing really wrong with that. Reading a lot, having the ambition to read a lot, being proud of having read so damn much, conscientiously choosing to expand and refine one’s reading….I’m just not seeing a downside here.
Writing is always going to be torture, certainly, but reading a lot is a fine way of enriching one’s writing without the expense of one’s patience or self-esteem. Everything influences you, right? No matter how small or ephemeral the reading experience, it seasons you.
Didn’t Roberto Bolano say that “reading is more important than writing”? I’ve wondered whether or not he was putting us on but I’m starting to think he really meant it….
When I started writing heavily in 2006 the number of books I read slipped from about 49 to almost nothing. I did not want to let what I read creep into my writing process. I also wrote a great deal more in the last 6 years than I had planned to. Now, I am working on two books simultaneously and my writing schedule has dropped to a snail’s pace as most of my time is spent promoting the other books. I have also dropped self-imposed deadlines which were once based on the standard publishing schedule followed by traditional publishers. I finally realized that writing as I find the time and the mood is better than making my work suffer with haste. As a matter of fact, I have left one book I was reading marked and have not picked it up in about a year, while I bought another and it is still there on the shelf, waiting to be read.
A for Robert Bolano, I think he missed the mark. Reading is AS important as writing, but if there is nothing written, one cannot find anything to read.
I really appreciate your honesty in this piece, Michael. I too have always kept obsessive track of my reading “stats,” and it’s pained me to have read fewer books this year and last because I’m now a mother as well as a writer and a reader (and a teacher, etc.). This year, I’d like to try to read longer and more challenging books, and not pay attention to numbers.
Good luck to both of us!
I loved reading this piece. I see so much of myself here, from the competitive, frantic way that I read, to the fear and loathing I have for my own writing. Lately, I feel that my reading is hindering my writing rather than helping it, simply for the fact that I spend so much of my free time reading instead of sitting down to write. Thanks for sharing this–it’s definitely made me think!
I started keeping track of what I read in 1996 with the idea that noting all the titles would be the first step in writing about each of them. That hasn’t happened yet, although I’ve finally moved in that direction the past three years.
Keeping track of the number of books I read has been an interesting byproduct of that effort. I realized that I average a bit over 100 a year, and I’ve started to use that total as a goal, only because I’ve realized I’ll never be able to make a dent in my shelves otherwise. If I can get through 1000 books a decade (and there are many more books worth reading than that) I can justify owning 5000 or so.
Life’s too short to worry about how many books I can get through in a year. I just read. If it’s 50 or 3, so be it.
I have kept a list of books read since 1976. Title, author, number of pages (so I can remember why it took a long time to finish a big book), and the date completed. I am an accountant and lawyer by education and profession, so keeping track of details comes natural, but over the years I wondered why I kept it up. Then one day 10 years back or so I looked over the list, and was amazed at how much of my past I could relate to the books I had read. I could not only remember the books themselves, but also the places where I read them, events in my life that were happening at the same time, and events in the world around those dates in general. I then understood that the unintended consequence of this obsession with detail was the opportunity many years on to remember and reminisce. I have continued to keep the list, and intend to do so until the end.
Thanks for your story and for the comments of other “listers”.
Enjoyed the perspective. I’ve kept my read-books list since 1986 and read 124 books in 2012–my best by a decent margin (still way less than some people, but I’m competing with myself, not with anyone else–plus I insist on having a life that includes other things than just reading and writing). So I understand the obsession. And I’ve recently been questioning its impact on my reading enjoyment, too. But I have 600+ books on my OTHER list, my list of books I want to read, and it keeps growing all the time, so there is significant pressure to continue.
Great post. I can totally relate to your issues, and now that I am also an author I read considerably less than I was. A paltry 37 down from my high of 56 per year. But I’ve backed away from the numbers game and will now stop reading a book half way through if I’m not enjoying it. Bring on the doorstops next December – it won’t phase me. Glad you’re feeling better about your own work. Enjoying the process is really the only thing that matters.
I really enjoy reading your post. It takes my boredom away.
Wait. Are you guys writers before you are readers?
I am an obsessive lister as well. But I also write briefly my impressions of each book, what format (Kindle, library, my book), number of pages, date finished, title an author. I find that ‘total number of pages’, which I compute at the end of the year, tells more about quantity than number of books.
I’ve kept a list since around 2000, including title, author, date started, and date completed (or in some cases, date abandoned). Like Randy Atkinson, I’m not a professional writer, in a literary sense, but a scientist. Most of my writing is, therefore, rather straightforward, following a specific format. And like Randy, keeping these records is a bit second nature. I started keeping the list as a method to gauge and improve my reading speed. I’m mildly dyslexic, which reduces the speed at which I can absorb and understand what I am reading. As such, my record—which occurred this past year—was a paltry (by everyone else’s standard) 18 books. But that is a vast improvement over my days in graduate school nearly 10 years ago when my average hovered around 5 non-work-related books. The self-competition has been a great strategy to train my brain to absorb faster!
Jorge Luis Borges always considered himself more of a reader than a writer and said his life had been, “”dedicated less to living than to reading.”
It looks like a lot of people shoot for the goal of reading one book a week., which is what I have always done. This year I read 56 books but have resolved to read much more and to cut down on how many films I watch. IN 2012 I saw 323 and have decided that is way too much. Besides, after watching 200+ a year for a few decades I am down to completing the oeuvres of the likes of Richard Dix and Helen Twelvetrees.
I can definitely relate to the list-keeping. I’ve recorded my books read since 1997, and do my own private victory lap in years I read more than 52 books. I was short in 2012, but I comforted myself by saying those two Stephen King books had enough pages to count as more. It’s nice to read that others look at reading as a private competition as well.
“Because in the end, whether you’re recording how many seconds it takes you to run a mile or how many books you read in a year, what you are really doing is finding a way to quantify your inner sense of self-worth.”
I googled “life’s short too many books” and it’s funny how that works. I’m trying to find a quote — and I landed on your page. I usually don’t comment on any articles that I’ve read but that line above actually made me step back and think.
You’re right. I’m relating this to one thing that I honestly felt applicable to me, aside from reading that is. I’m a pediatric nurse at a government hospital (and you should know how hard the conditions our hospital have and in my area, the number of really sick children being admitted there) — and since I started my career 3 years ago, I’ve handled 84 deaths during my shift alone. (Not just my patients but my other co-workers’ too — just the same shift.)
I didn’t know why I was actually counting at first, all I know was that those 84 children who died was the ones I was trying to save but fail. And if I just really think hard enough, there were more those that I actually saved and were discharged – -and whenever I think about that, it really feels good.
So thanks to you because while reading this post, I realized why I’m counting those deaths. It’s because I’m trying to “quantify my inner sense of self-worth.” Which I think is actually true.
Library due dates tend to determine my reading schedule, and when I do buy books or receive them as gifts they tend to sit on the shelf for months.
I don’t have a per week goal so much as a goal to finish most of the library books I have out at any given time. It rarely happens.
Joel,
I agree, the library due dates are a good discipline for forcing me to plow through my reading list. Those books I buy or receive as gifts tend to linger on the shelf until I lose interest.
Nice essay. As for the competitive spirit, this is a race you can never win. Every week, you can find as many new books on the display table at Barnes & Noble as it takes you to read in a year.
I solved this problem by reading Edward Gorey. Presto! 50 books in two weeks, each slowly read and savored.
I mimic your exact behavoir though at significantly retarded level of 20 books a year. I recently read novellas (a technicality I allowed) to meet the quote after sacrificing to read Infinite Jest, Matterhorn, and Mason & Dixon. The fact that I have the same sentiment/anxiety from making the lists really connected with me. This year, I still think i’m going to read more, but have the attitude you have. Thanks for this. I wrote down your name next to my authors to follow. Hopefully, there will be more soon.
I know this is missing the point, but I am curious what you use to document the books you read? Seems like you’re able to keep some sort of tagging system to determine those percentages.
Unit bias is the psychological term for counting pages and pushing yourself to “good stopping places” like the ends of chapters. In food, it means you drink a 20oz bottle of Coke when all you really wanted was 8oz. But in books it means you read more, (because you can’t go to bed until you’re on page 162, which is exactly three-fifths of way to the end of book, etc.) I love creating arbitrary unit markers and then forcing myself to achieve them. X books a year, means Y books a month, means Z books a week, means A pages a day, means B pages every hour, so I need to read at a rate of B pages/hour to achieve X books per year. Does that make me geeky?
Unit bias is the psychological term for counting pages and pushing yourself to “good stopping places” like the ends of chapters. In food, it means you drink a 20oz bottle of Coke when all you really wanted was 8oz. But in books it means you read more, (because you can’t go to bed until you’re on page 162, which is exactly three-fifths of way to the end of book, etc.) I love creating arbitrary unit markers and then forcing myself to achieve them. X books a year, means Y books a month, means Z books a week, means A pages a day, means B pages every hour, so I need to read at a rate of B pages/hour to achieve X books per year. Does that make me geeky?
Incidentally, I racked up 120 books last year. How? Well, as some were as long as Crime and Punishment and the Brothers Karamazov, some where as short as the Rime of the Ancient Mariner. Also, I download audiobooks from the library and play them back at 2X speed while I do the house hold chores. I also listen to books on tape in the car, read paperbacks in the evenings. I do not kindle or nook. See you on goodreads.
reading the ” My New year resolution: Rear Fewer Books….” me, it´s all you can help to read it.
I read 265 books in 27 months as a Peace Corps volunteer, keeping a careful log that included prime quotes (no tv, long train rides). It totally changed my relationship with reading. I pushed myself to read more, but I didn’t like it as much.
I loved your article and I wish you were my neighbor. I’ve kept a list of every book I have read since 1982. It is my favorite list as I can see what was happening in my own life by the titles – mysteries became interesting to me when I was going through a divorce – they seldom have much romance and feel like real life, which is suddenly actually a mystery in itself. I’ve had years where I read short happy novels to relax and up my annual numbers and years where every volume was deep and long. One year I went so deep into Henry the VIII and Cleopatra that I could teach college courses. And one year it was all about time travel. My best years are the ones that include a world of new subjects by authors from all over the world.
Two years ago, after four moves in a year I became a fanatic of the Nook – I thought paper and fonts and the beauty of books would make it impossible to love a Nook, but the fact that I can read without a light in bed, choose my own font size and page color makes my ‘over sixty’ eyes happy and instead of ten boxes of books, I have 200 on my nook. I’m in love.