(no subject)

Oh good, another one of those Depressing Middle Age Threshold Realizations just hit me.

Proud as I am that I'm on track to read 75 books this year (mostly by picking super short ones, being unconscionably blithe about content overlap, and spending a lot of time guarding a scattershot unwell loved one), it occurs to me that even at this unsustainable rate:

A) If my male-average-life-expectancy-at-birth is accurate I'll have read about 3000 more books, including rereads, before dying.

B) By retirement age I'll have read between 2000 and 2500 more.

C) By 50, when life has gone on long after the thrill of living is gone, I'll have read 1150 or so more.

Actually, that's become less depressing since I wrote it out. I've read, I don't know, c. 2000 in my time and wouldn't dream of rereading 90% of those, despite trying hard, as we all do, to pick good ones. And most of them were good, they just weren't spectacularly better than doing whatever else I could have doing at the time. But the c. 200 best were worth both the reading and the hunting through all the rest. And hypothetically I could double that in under three years, at this (unsustainable for slow-reading me) rate, assuming I'm ridiculously lucky, haven't already cleaned out all the best books, and that they're all really short.

I guess I just panicked at having any kind of quantification between me and death. Which serves me right for looking for one. Depressing Middle Aged Threshold Realization #44A: don't look for those.

I wonder if a point gets reached where list-making of any sort, past short-term to-do kinds of things, gets a bit chilling. I don't know anyone as addicted to fruitless listmaking as I am (they're so calming, especially in tense times, and they always come up a little different), but I wouldn't be surprised to find the habit falls away at not much older than I am now.

(no subject)

29. On Writing, Borges
30. Henry 4, Pirandello/Stoppard
31. Macbeth, Shakespeare
32. Jesus' Son, Denis Johnson

Good book. The movie was great, and this was better. The phrases on that guy.

33. Eclogues, Virgil/Ferry
34. Selected Poems, Coleridge
35. Lyrical Ballads, Wordsworth/Coleridge
36. The Essential Keats
37. The Ruined Cottage et al., Wordsworth
38. The Essential Blake
39. The Wind and the Rain, ed. Bloom/Hollander
40. The Essential Byron
41. The Two Part Prelude et al., Wordsworth
42. The Essential Wordsworth, ed. Heaney

Heaney's Introduction is quite fine--Wordsworth's hard to summarize. His project was so strange but so very... And he fucked it up, sure, but it's clearly the project, and who else can you say that about. The short, 1000-line Prelude is startlingly great every time, for those of you who don't already know that.

(no subject)

Books on my nightstand read part-way (to help explain why I finish so few):

Rereads:

Numbers in the Dark (c. 100 pages in)
The Trial (80)
The Scarlet Letter (70)
In Our Time (40)
Don Juan (250)
If on a Winter's Night a Traveler (180)

New to me:

Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis (120)
The Cave (110)
Selected Poems of Whitman, ed. Bloom (50)
Nemesis (200)
Invisible Man (50)
Pride and Prejudice (70)
Tender Is the Night (50)
Borges at 80 (50)
Six Memos for the Next Millennium (40)
The Selfish Gene (80)
ABBA ABBA (30)

Almost done with my main reading of the last weeks, Bloom's two early Romantic Poetry anthologies and his Oxford Anthology with Trilling--except the Shelley portions. But they overlap extensively with those Ecco "Essential" volumes, as does Auden's Signet selection from Byron, which got me started on the Don Juan. Been reading a lot of Byron's and Keats' letters, too, but not in order. Can anyone read a letters volume through? I sure can't; I've never seen a biopic that didn't drag.