Hopefully this post will be somewhat comprehensible. The New Yorker (bane of this project) recently ran a piece called The Pleasure of Reading to Impress Yourself. I actually think this piece's reach exceeds its grasp, but nonetheless I enjoyed it. It resonated with me, since really, maybe that's the point of the list project at the end of the day?
I admit that I'm often pretty self-deprecating when I talk about this endeavor. Some of that is sincere in that I don't think this project is unusually impressive or better than other reading projects or priorities. At the same time, I do think that I have benefited enormously as a reader by doing this project.
I knew that the project would expose me to books that I would not have otherwise read, and that's certainly been a main benefit. I've fallen in love with authors' works that I certainly would have been very unlikely to come across some other way. But there's more than that.
By trying to read so much and so broadly and works so ambitious and at times challenging, I've expanded my horizons as a reader. I better appreciate references and in-jokes. I can see how certain writers influenced others; I can trace the evolution of the novel through my own firsthand reading experiences. I've come to understand certain authors by looking to the dominant questions/methods/movements of other art forms (e.g. Joyce and Woolf and the visual arts at the time, etc.). I'm a faster reader, and ironically a more patient, trusting reader.
Right now I'm reading Celestial Harmonies, which is a great example of why I love the list project. At first I didn't enjoy it at all, but as I kept going and it began to unfold in this amazingly intricate, exquisite way, I've come to love it. Even if I had tried it without the project, I probably wouldn't have kept going long enough to reach this point.
So, yes, I'm self-deprecating/mocking about this project, but at the end of the day, undertakings like this do come with rewards singular to ambitious projects.
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