The 50-Book Challenge

Since I have not read a book today, or this week, I've decided that my first contribution will be simply to write a little bit about the "50-book challenge". There are so many blogs about the "50-book challenge" over the last couple of years, that I will not even link to them all here -- if you Google the "50-book challenge", you will get plenty of them. The fact that it was already dubbed a "meme" by the beginning of 2004 here and here makes me feel considerably behind the curve. In fact, since I've actually read a physical book about the 50-book challenge, I feel even more behind the curve!

However, Sara Nelson must have been amazingly prescient, fast, or both. Her book, So Many Books, So Little Time: A Year of Passionate Reading (2004), despite the rather dowdy cover and title, actually turned out to be an enjoyable collection of essays about the habits, moods, and effects of reading. It also has a lot to say about reading that isn't about numbers or achievement, such as the relationships you form (or destroy) over books, whether with family, friends, or coworkers; the associations and attachments that we develop to books, regardless of their content; and the right book at the right place at the right time.

Nelson is a New York book editor, so she describes a rather book-obsessed existence. She describes many ways that one can become an inveterate reader, for example, carrying around books at all times, and her entire community of friends that revolves around books, or at least that's how she describes them. However, the most winning part of her book is when she acknowledges that her attachment to books is entirely her own, for example when she talks about books with her husband (despite that fact that he rather charmingly says he doesn't read at all), or when her son disagrees with her own book taste (at some amazingly precocious age).

The effect of books on my life is also cropping up, since I've just moved cities, and had to decide what to bring with me. I think I've moved to Seattle for a good amount of time, and so I've shipped 15 boxes of books out here. Now where do I put them in my one-bedroom apartment? What makes me feel extremely guilty is that of the 15 boxes, five are probably truly meaningful, life-changing books, five boxes are of books that I have either sentimental or practical attachments to, and five are boxes of books that I haven't read at all.

So though I applaud the discipline and ambition of the 50-book challenge, I think I may set myself a different challenge. I don't have a problem picking up books, or reading them, it's just that I never feel like I have the time to engage them fully. So perhaps I will try to read, with extreme deliberation and intention, all of those books that I've stockpiling for years, and that I've been dragging around. I'd like to settle down a bit, and fully inhabit my library.

Now, I have to go off and read more for graduate school, but in academic-speak, I will think of how to "operationalize" this later.