What I'm Reading/In the Book Review
As we begin a new year of reading, I wonder how my own book list will track the ones that appear in the Times at the end of the year. If I was looking for official validation of my judgment in 2007, the Times was not there to provide it. Each year, the Book Review selects ten best books, to which the principal critics of the daily paper add another thirty. I read only one of the Book Review’s best books (Joshua Ferris’s wonderful Then We Came To The End), and I owned only one of the daily’s thirty (Tim Weiner’s Legacy of Ashes, about the CIA). Worse, I realized that if anyone asked me for a list of the ten best books of the year, I wouldn’t be able to answer off the top of my head — although I would certainly mention Mr Ferris’s book. It occurs to me that list-building is not an activity to reserve for December.
What with the holidays, I haven’t been reading very much. The bedside pile just gets higher. What’s dispiriting isn’t so much the rising altitude itself as the incongruity between enjoying reading and feeling compelled to consume books. One instinct puts books in the pile while the other tries to knock them out. It also bothers me that there seems to be no plan behind my reading choices; it’s just one damned thing after another. Now, that’s something to work on in 2008. It’s certainly more important than deciding what the “best books” were.Â
As for this week’s Book Review,
¶ Strong Opinions.