I used to get depressed whenever I walked into a bookstore. I would stand there dazzled by the thousands of titles—so many of them so intriguing—and feel the fingernails of death at my neck. Everywhere I looked I saw books I yearned to read—The Bookseller of Kabul, How the Irish Saved Civilization, The Morrow Guide to Knots, Society of Mind. I would never live long enough to read them all. Strolling through the bookstore gave me a feeling like strolling through a cemetery. Each alluring book marked a mile on a road I could never hope to travel to the end.

It's a matter of arithmetic. On any given shelf, one book in ten seemed irresistible. Given a total bookstore inventory of 100,000 distinct titles, I had 10,000 books to read before I die. I've got 60 years left on the outside, so that's 166 books a year. To read all the books I want to read, I have to read three a week.

In college I took a course in Great Books of the Western World and blazed through about three books a week. I learned more in that course than in all my other college courses combined, but the pace exhausted me. These days I read a book or two a month, and I'm content with that. I wouldn't enjoy reading three books a week for the rest of my life. It would feel like work. My brain would fill up.

So I realized I was running out of time. Despite my biblio-morbidity, or perhaps because of it, I never left a bookstore empty-handed. Soon my shelves were covered in books I never read. Book-shopping lead to depression and shame, and I stopped going to bookstores.

I didn't give up reading books—I just took a new approach to getting them. My policy: Never buy a new book when you can buy a used one; never buy a book you can borrow. This policy saved me a lot of money. I could buy A Gentle Madness on Amazon for $15 or get it from the library for free. The policy also made me more deliberate about what I read. I could no longer load up a shopping cart of books I happened to like—now I first had to identify each book I wanted to read, then find the best place to get it. I had to want each book badly enough to think about it, to seek it out.

The Pencil

Even though I avoided bookstores, I still added daily to the sad list of books I would die without ever having read. Then I came across a book that helped to change my attitude.

It was The Pencil, by Henri Petroski. It looked fascinating—a historical romp through the evolution of that most underappreciated of tools, the lowly pencil, complete with insightful applications to the study of engineering in general. How do people make things?—that's the essential question—How do they make them better and better over time? A thousand titillating questions would orbit and illuminate the central one: Why are pencils so often that color of yellow? Who had the bright idea to make pencils hexagonal—not square, not octagonal—so they refuse to roll off your desk? What sort of wood do they make pencils out of? When did they start sticking erasers on them? An object we take for granted would prove to be a treasure trove of fascinating factoids.

As it happened, The Pencil bored me to tears. And this made me question my arithmetic. Sure, 1 in 10 books on the shelves looked intriguing, but you can't, as they say, judge a book by its cover.

Take On Bullshit by Harry G. Frankfurt. How can you go wrong with a scholarly treatise on the practice of bullshitting from Princeton University Press with a cover so uncool it's cool and an expletive front and center? It can't help but be droll and charming and witty. Well I've read it and here's the punchline: This really is a scholarly work. I found it quite interesting, actually, but it's nothing like funny; and at $10 for 80 tiny little pages, it's nothing like worth it.

Or take Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by Robert M. Pirsig. Winsome premise: man motorcycles across America in search of himself and a profound philosophy. What they don't tell you is that Mr. Pirsig thinks he is the smartest and wisest and most mysterious and just all-round neatest fellow he has ever known, and he can't get enough of himself. None of which, by the way, leads to any sort of coherent philosophy, much less a profound one.

I reworked my math. Ten percent of books seem fascinating; ten percent of those actually are. A great deal of what gets published lacks any appreciable beauty, truth, or value. That's kind of depressing—but at least I don't have so much to read now.

Reading for Nourishment

So I have another policy. I'll give a book a couple of chapters; if it fails to engross me, I get rid of it. Life's too short to read boring books.

How do you know when a book's worth reading? Right now I'm reading Glamorous Powers by Susan Howatch, a novel about a psychic monk at the outbreak of World War II. Sounds ridiculous, I know, but a friend recommended it. And do you know—it has absolutely pulled me under. The very thought of reading it in the evening brightens my afternoon. That's the test of a worthwhile book: it sheds light; it affects. Not all good books thrill, but all good books nourish.

So I asked myself: Why did I waste so much time and money on books that ended up a slog? And I realized to my horror that what drew me to those books was the hope they would make me more respectable.

I wanted to read all the "important" books—Vonnegut and Catch 22 and The Sun Also Rises—books you can mention to good effect at parties. I raided bookstores and stayed up late at night earning clout, dreaming of—or dreading—the day someone would ask me whether I had ever read X. Sure I read for pleasure, and for knowledge, and for insight—but most of all I read to impress.

The trouble, of course, is that no one ever asks. People care about what team you're rooting for; they care about how you got your lawn so green; people don't care if you read Godel, Escher, Bach. There are maybe 600 people in the United States who will like you better if you can rattle off a slick reading resume, and they spend their time chatting to each other on NPR and C-Span 2. Nobody cares what I read. The respect I strove to earn was never up for auction.

Now I can walk into any bookstore, anytime, and look it straight in the eyes (like James Frey at the end of A Million Little Pieces). I walk in, I look around, I see something intriguing, I jones, I get out, I go to the library. I give away my books every chance I get, so they don't get attached, like wayward kittens. You've got to own your books or they'll own you. And the best way to own them is as little as possible.

Labels: books