Reading 2009

4 comments

1. Impressive. You really like to read. I don’t know how you find the time or energy to keep up the pace. Don’t you ever just sit around and watch TV or browse the web? Or play the Wii?

2. Like to read? Yes. And, yes, I still watch too much TV, browse the web way too much, and have been playing about a round of golf each night recently on the Wii. I just slack in lots of other areas.

3. Wow! You’re a man after my own heart! I was once an outrageous reader, reading 365 books in 1969 while at the University of Connecticut, preparing to write my dissertation on the color green a a dominant symbol of a lost Eden in American fiction. Then during the early to mid-1990’s, I was reading as many as 20-25 different books at a time, allowing myself roughly 10 minutes–or a chapter, more or less–in each, either late at night or early in the morning. But that was also back when I was, little by little, cutting my sleeping hours back from 7 hours a night, dropping a half-hour every week until I was down to 3 1/2 hours a night, and then, almost instantly, something went cuckoo with both my eyes and my brain —diagnosed as “transglobal amnesia”–! Anyway, I had to stop immediately and I then started getting six-to-six-and-a-half hours of sleep each night, and then went slowly back to reading. But–I was a little cautious AND, actually, a little put off by books—especially since my wife then belonged to about 4 different bookclubs and seemed to be reading dozens of dozens of books, one after another, until I actually developed a kind of perverse aversion toward reading! I think the last two books I managed to read, from cover to cover, were back in about 2001, and they were Arundhati Roy’s THE GOD OF SMALL THINGS (MY choice–and I loved it) and Arthur Golden’s MEMOIRS OF A GEISHA (YOUR choice, as I recall, Jason–and I liked IT a lot too) . . . But that was nearly 10 years ago, and, though I started three or four books since then, I never finished a single ONE of them!!! So, no books read for essentially 10 years . . . Go figure!
   Getting back in touch with you, however, might just be the thing to get be back on track—along with my completing my 29-year-project of a book of interviews with the 70 of the world’s most fascinating art-film directors! from 34 different countries!

4. Hi MAybe 9 years too late, but wow what a great list of reads. Inspired me to get on to Library Thing too. Cheers