The FAQ Part I

This seems a little self-serving, but on the other hand, people really do tend to ask me the same questions when they first learn that I am attempting to read each and every book on the 1,001 Books to Read Before You Die list (from here on out, just the list). The project also comes up pretty frequently, for three reasons 1) if you're reading Babbitt, King Solomon's Mines, or American Psycho, people will want to know why, 2) I tend to trot this out when I need to make small talk, since I find it a remarkably impersonal topic to discuss, and 3) it tends to snowball from there since people tell other people. I don't really know why.

Without further ado, The FAQ:

How do you decide what to read? What people really mean, usually, is: "Are you reading in order? Oldest to most recent?" to which the answer would be, no. Not even close. The process isn't exactly random, but it's not apparently systematic and it's hard to describe. It's a combination of what I feel like reading, and what I can easily get from the local library (I rarely buy a book on the list).

I have to break up authors and genres. D. H. Lawrence and Evelyn Waugh become repetitive if you try to read more than two in a row. I need to start on Dickens soon here (I've only read A Tale of Two Cities, Nicholas Nickleby, and Christmas Carol) or I will really be in trouble later. I also need to break up styles. White men are a bit overrepresented in the list (why should it be different than congress?), and I need to slip in some women, people of color, and people not from the US or Europe on occasion or I start to get cranky. A little Noir goes a long way, and coming of age stories get old quite quickly.

Overall, though, the project is capricious. If it looks long and painful, I try to bookened it with something shorter and more fun. In general I try to go long, short, long, short as much as possible.

How much do you read a day/week? How long does it take you to read a book? I average around 100 pages a day (50 pages each way on my commute! Thanks, Red Line, for single tracking!). I try to read at least two books a week.

Do you ever stop a book once you've started it? In theory, no (see the rules). In practice, once. This reasoning behind the rule that I have to finish the books is simple. I'm only putting it off, since if I seriously plan to finish the list, then eventually I will have to read it. I prefer to do unpleasant things right away, so coming back to books doesn't make sense for me. It's also way too easy to shop around different books and never actually finish anything. Making the rule hard and fast keeps me moving forward.

There has been one exception though, in the form of Franny and Zooey. I actually find this exception ironic, given that when I came back to it I really enjoyed it (I would love to see the scene with Zooey and his mother as a play short). When I first tried to read it, though, I was dealing with my own angst, and didn't need Franny's adding to it. While the fact that I enjoyed it more when I came back might be an argument for letting myself not finish books on the first go, I think it's easy for that to become a cop-out/excuse for not finishing. If I genuinely think I will get more out of a book if I wait, then I will. If I'm just being lazy or indulging my short attention span, then the rule keeps me accountable.

What will you read when this is done? Books that aren't on the list. One thousand and one is a lot, granted, but there are so many books (and plays, memoirs, essays, short stories, and poems which don't usually appear on the list) that didn't make the list, and more are always coming out, that I am not at all worried. I find this question one of the most strange. When people do ask, they always sound so genuinely concerned that I will somehow run out of reading material before I turn 40.