Anxiety over my current plunge back into academia has been causing me to read theory over fiction, canon poets over whoever my friends told me I would love. There is also a stack of books seven feet tall by my desk that consists of things I’ve felt like I’m supposed to read out of an obligation to stay current or complete my reading of so and so and barf barf barf. Reading is work when you make it like that. Reading can become not comfort or discomfort but an object for the brain to process and situate.
I drew up a list of literary recommendations that I’d been ignoring, and for my birthday my family sent me what is going to make me happy in my free time for the next year or two:
The Battlefield Where the Moon Says I Love You by Frank Stanford
Slouching Towards Bethlehem by Joan Didion
Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned by Wells Tower
Black Hole by Charles Burns
Collected Poems by James Schuyler
Habibi by Craig Thompson
Underworld by Don DeLillo
Diwata by Barbara Jane Reyes
Thanks, atomic family.
What are you not reading because of what you think you should be reading?
My problem, I start a book a day, no kid. A recent Atlantic article called my type of reading, multi-tasker. Doesn’t bode well when Infinite Jest is one of the books on the nightstand!
That’s a lot of books. There does seem to be a lot of theorizing out there in terms of how our internet reading habits are infecting other reading habits (i.e. multi-tasking?) Wonder if that is going on. I tend not to do that or I tend to think I don’t do that and worry I do. I probably do. Also, I read a book while falling asleep, don’t remember most of it, start from where I started, and ….