The obsessive planner, essentially, is demanding certain reassurances from the future – but the future isn’t the sort of thing that can ever provide the reassurance he craves. – Oliver Burkeman
It’s become a bit of a joke at work how out-of-control my backlist is, but it’s ha-ha-only-serious actually quite a source of stress and diminishment of the joy of reading; there are just so many books that I really want to read, that I don’t want to let go of, and a sort of vanishing hopelessness of ever actually getting closer to reading the new stuff that I find and add. At one point the combined lists in several places topped out at nearly 900 TBRs; between increasingly ruthless passes of culling the lists, chipping away steadily at the back end, and becoming aggressively discerning about what books I add, I’ve brought it down to about 650. With a backlist like that, book discovery is…. not fun anymore. I’m thoroughly enjoying just about everything I read, but choosing what to read next is a mechanistic process of picking from the list what feels most urgent, and browsing is fraught with weird feelings of guilt, shame, and impatience.
That’s a problem. Besides the obvious personal issue of sucking the joy out of something I love, it’s a problem professionally. Burnout in book discovery for my own reading is one short step away from burnout in readers’ advisory, which is a huge (and much-loved) part of my job. If browsing the new books shelf feels like self-flagellation, then I’m not picking things up and reading back blurbs and adding them to my repertoire, I’m not participating in conversations with colleagues about reading, I’m not paying attention to new authors.
I knew this was an issue, but I didn’t realize how unhappy I was about it until I was in front of a stall on the Calle de Claudio de Moyano, the open-air booksellers’ market on the southern edge of Madrid’s Parque de Retiro, thinking more about the weight of my suitcase than the length of my reading list, and choosing with care the handful of books that I would bring home and add to my tiny but growing collection of Spanish literature. It was pure, quiet joy; it took me back to my college days and afternoons at The Country Bookshop in Plainfield, Vermont, to pilgrimages with John to Black & Read in Denver hoping to find the rare paperback covers of sci-fi classics to fill gaps in his collection. I’d forgotten; I’d had an ache in my soul where that joy used to be for so long that I’d gotten used to and numbed out the ache.
That is true of many things, I’m finding, and that needs to change.
My new year’s resolution this year is to let go things that are getting in the way of the things I want more of in my life.
So this year I’m trying a new approach.
First, I’m not putting new releases on my to-read list anymore. If I’m not excited enough about it to put it on hold on the spot, then that ship has sailed, sorry. Maybe in a couple of years it’ll pop back up on my radar? Maybe at some point in the future I’ll have bandwidth to be able to say, “I know I want to read that but not right now” again. But I’m not counting on it.
Second – last year I picked back up my grad-school practice of post-it noting books as I read them and then revisiting the notes at the end, copying down quotes to keep on 3×5 cards and chasing down references. I’ve mostly been doing this for heavy nonfiction, to capture key information, and I’ve done less and less noting over the course of this year, and there have been some really great books I’ve read without post-its handy, and I have no notes for them, and that makes me sad. I want to reverse that trend, really ramp it up and pick up more inspirational and thought-provoking material too, and spend a little more time sitting with each book I finish before moving on to the next.
Third, I’m going to continue to be really, really conservative about adding new stuff. Part of the spiraling out of control was the self-perpetuating rabbithole of “read one book, add three references to the TBR list”; a certain amount of that is inevitable but dammit, I’ve got to just be better and more realistic about picking and choosing.
But part of it was a sort of promise to myself that there would be life after grad school, there would be time to read for fun again, and there is, of course, but not as much as I thought there would be, there never is. As Burkeman says, when you demand reassurance from the future, you’re – unavoidably, inherently – neglecting the present. This is life after grad school, this is what the kept promise looks like, and I cannot just continue to demand and demand from the future; I have to live in the present too.
Maybe I’ll read less this year, but I’ll read slower, I’ll read in a more balanced and healthy way, and I’ll take more away from what I read. Maybe that will feed into my relationship with writing too.