Reading Matters

A couple of things to read:

Kieran spends a "messy evening" with Bassvictim, whose music is one of the rare things he's alerted me to that I actively enjoy, but who sound rather alarming as an interview experience. 

And then this mega-post from Matthew Ingram at Sick Veg which is not just something else worth reading but a gateway to an enormous number of other things worth reading. 

In the tradition of his 100 Best Records and similar epic sweeping-survey bloggerations at Woebot and its precursor blogs, this is an inventory of non-fiction books that Matt read while researching his trilogy of linked books:  Retreat, The 'S' Word and The Garden.  Organized into categories such as Psychoanalysis, Eastern Philosophy, Self-Sufficiency, Acid, Anti-Psychiatry, Beat, Agriculture, Communes, Permaculture, Anthropology, Tibet....

Actually, inventory is the wrong word: the Sick Veg 100 is the distillate of, or extremely selective selection from, the two thousand  books he read -  the nutter that he is! An obsessive after my own heart, Matt, but with a capacity for research and filtration that far exceeds my own. 

This is one of the handful books on the List that I own - and, naturally, I haven't read it.  

(Theodore Roszak's work is so important to Matt that he actually has his own category in the List.)

My rate of reading has slowed down grievously. I must have at least 400 never-even-opened or started-but-got-only-a-little-way in tomes lying around the house in neglected piles. (And many, many more in naughty PDF or epub form).

Supposedly having lots of unread books is the mark of the true bibliophile (was it Benjamin who said that, or Eco?).  But this seems like an odd way of loving books - not reading them. 

Not counting all the text I consume on the internet, reading seems to occupy a smaller and smaller portion of my waking hours. Which is sad to consider, given that, outside of spending time with beloved people, reading is probably my greatest pleasure - perhaps even more so than listening to music. 

As a child, I could read several books a week. I would burn through the stuff. Such that rereading was a big feature of my life. Certain books, or book series, would get read three or four times. 

What is to blame for the eroded capacity? 

The obvious things: the computer, the phone, the immense amount and range of television and film available in the domestic space nowadays, YouTube...  The kind of everyday places and phases of down time that would once involve reading a book or at least magazine - commuting, using public transport, waiting in a queue or for an appointment - you will now reflexively fill up with phone scrollige. 

The desire to read is there.... but things seem to get in the way.  I'll have four or five books on the go at once, but make tortuous headway with all of them. 

I finished the Gormenghast trilogy - but it took me over a year.

And there's a sense of time running out. 

Which then creates an almost voluptuous feeling of sin when you succumb to the temptation to reread a favorite, knowing all the while that there are thousands and thousands of books out there you should be reading.... hundreds in the house alone, already paid for or otherwise acquired... 

Rereading is never a completely empty, reiterative act of nostalgia - so much that's contained in the beloved book you will have completely forgotten. New details in the text will be noticed for the first time...  fresh perspectives emerge through accumulated life experience or different knowledge... 

Still, it feels deliciously indulgent, a dereliction of duty. 

For instance, I quite fancy picking up Titus Groan again...