I’m currently reading The Power Broker. Are you impressed? You should be. I am big-boy writer who reads big-boy books. A thousand-page investigation into the life of a powerful bureaucrat is nothing to me. I’m gonna finish The Power Broker, and then you will regard me as one of the world’s elite readers, as you should.
There’s just one problem. I’m also reading Paper, by Mark Kurlansky. And Island of the Blue Foxes, by Stephen Brown. And Coffeeland, by Augustine Sedegwick. And a dozen other books too, all at the same time. I also paused in the middle of reading all of those books to read, in its entirety, a history of The Cars, even though I was never that into The Cars. Reading that book led me to reading an entire oral history of MTV’s first decade on the air, which led me to reading an entire oral history of the Sunset Strip hair metal scene in the 1980s. Oh and after that, I finally started in on Mick Herron’s Slow Horses novels, which I’m definitely gonna finish before I return to all of those other books I’m reading, like the first one I mentioned. The Power Broker. I think that was the name of it.
I’ll get back around to Robert Caro’s Pulitzer-winner eventually. For now though, it sits in my Kindle library, sharing low completion percentages with multiple other tomes, some of which I haven’t picked back up in years. I also have a pile of somewhat-read dead-tree books stacked next to my nightstand. That pile used to rest on my nightstand before it grew too tall and wobbly. Now it serves as its own little extra nightstand in our bedroom. Sometimes I throw a t-shirt onto it.
Clearly, I do not read like a normal person. I aspire to read every book in full, in sequential order. That’s how my wife reads books. That’s how my colleagues are able to hold book club chats where everyone has read the book assigned. That’s how everyone on Goodreads reads books, or at least how they front like they do. These people are faithful to their books. I am not. I cheat on one book with another book, and then I cheat on that book when another book catches my wandering eye. I am a bookanizer.
Given that I write books for a living, I should probably hide this fact from the general public. I’ve even cheated on books written by my friends, and that’s when I can even be bothered to start them. In internet-ese, this makes me a psychopath. In real life, this makes me lazy, distracted, and a touch guilty. A good writer should be a good reader, and I don’t know if I qualify as one.
I’ve always had an odd relationship with reading. Like most people, the first full books I ever read were ones that I was forced to read in school: Johnny Tremaine, Great Expectations … all of the boringest shit a middle school English teacher could force on a kid. Thus, I hated reading. My standardized test scores in grade school reflected this. In fact, my folks had to enroll me into a special program at the public school in Orono, Maine just so that I could catch up to my peers. I eventually did so, partially thanks to the much better books I was assigned in high school (Catch-22, A Clockwork Orange, Animal Farm). But I still lagged when it came to reading for pleasure. When certain books hit me, like The Great Brain did when I was 10, I can burn through them in a matter of hours. I’ve read books like that anywhere: on an airplane, in bed, while sitting on the staircase of our house, whatever. I can’t remember why I read on the staircase, but I did.
Those binges were scant, though. If a book didn’t grab me by the shoulders within the first 100 pages or so, I’d let it drift. I got this habit from my old man, who was always a streaky reader himself. But I figured I’d grow out of it as I aged, that I’d eventually become the kind of staid 40-something who could make a whole Sunday out of Wuthering Heights, or some other Victorian classic that I wouldn’t touch with a 10-foot clown pole.
I haven’t. Instead, I remain a literary grazer. The odd thing is how much I’ll read of a book before cheating. I’m not content to read just a free sample. I’ll pay for the whole book, dig in for multiple chapters, and then start wondering if I should be reading something cooler/faster/more hair metal-y. Then I’ll check my phone. Then I’ll watch 20 minutes of Task, because I’m still working my way through that show. Then I’ll, then I’ll, then I’ll, then I’ll…
When you take into account the 21st century distraction landscape, it’s not a shock that my attention span is fleeting when it comes to basically everything. In my writerly mind, however, books deserve to exist outside of that mess. I’ve never been terribly precious about the craft of writing, like a lot of other professional bourbon bastards are. But I know how much time, care and effort goes into writing a real book. I know that if someone bailed on one of mine after 100 pages, I’d be irritated. I also know how critical books are to human life in general, and why they have to be both elevated and protected by a functional society. And yet here I am, quietly disrespecting Robert Caro, the greatest literary historian to ever live, to check 300 pages on why Cinderella’s Heartbreak Station didn’t get as much respect as it should have. I feel like I’m doing literature all wrong, which is why I have a standing resolution to spend my retirement years as a monogamous reader.
You know how resolutions go though, don’t you? You make a resolution to acknowledge that you have shit to work on, and then you decide that recognizing the problem was work enough. That’s me. Because I like sleeping around with lots of books. I love shopping for books (be it online or in a store). I love a good prologue. I love knowing that if one book is making me sleepy, I’ll always have another one to switch over to. There are so many good books out there, and it pains me to know that I won’t be able to read all of them before I die. But I can read 27 percent of each of them. For better or worse, that’ll always be the greater turn-on. I’ll break more authors’ hearts before I’m finished.
