Vacation Reading

It's vacation time! I'm packing tonight so we can leave for the beach as soon as I get home tomorrow afternoon (well, I have to pack the cooler first but that's a quick task). With packing comes the need to decide which books to take with me. I like to have plenty of options. I'm firmly into The Goldfinch. I wasn't sure how the must read book of a couple years ago would strike me, but I find myself sacrificing time playing the latest Zelda game to read this instead. That's a strong statement of readability. So The Goldfinch and it's impressive bulk will be coming with me. I'm making steady progress on The Radicalism of the American Revolution. While that's not exactly a beach read, I'm going to take it with me in the event that I want to keep reading my 10 or so pages a day to finally get that one finished. 

Those two books will probably be enough to keep me fully supplied with reading material for the week, but you never know how these things will play out. I will have plenty of room in my bag for another book or two. My plan for the past month or so has been to start reading the Kingkiller Chronicles while at the beach. I started my long journey with The Malazan Book of the Fallen while on vacation at the beach in 2013. It just feels right to start these massive fantasy series while on vacation. I have clear memories of reading A Dance with Dragons in the hotel room at the beach. Thick fantasy tomes goes with the beach like beer and sunscreen.

I'm way behind on my Modern Library Top 100 reading. I will likely throw Deliverance into my bag as well. It's on the shorter side so I might actually get a little closer to my 30 book goal for the year.

The Reef (167 books remain)

I had a post with some comments on The Reef all ready to go, but then I actually finished the book and realized that I had it all wrong. I let the blurb on the back of the book make me think the core commentary of the novel was social criticism and critique of The Patriarchy. It's a much more internal drama. You could read the characters as representing some larger social movement, but the drama is much more personal. The characters are not neat symbols with clearly defined characteristics portraying a single value. They suffer from the complexities and ambiguities inherent in life. Their choices, a consequence of time and circumstances, have consequences. The consequence of choice is really at the core of the novel. You can choose to trust somebody, but do you ever really know what they're thinking or feeling? One person can cause bring you joy and happiness, but the same person can also bring you pain. There is no simple explanation or foolproof method to divine the truth of a person's heart and soul. The novel ends without a neat resolution to the conflict that drives the narrative. There really isn't a story as much as a slow unfolding of a relationship. It's a book that improves after reading. It was hard to read. The pace was slow and the indecision and uncertainty of Anna Leath was frustrating. If I had been quicker to pick up on the reality captured in the novel I may have found it more enjoyable to read. 

It's remarkable that a book written almost a century ago can capture so much of what happens in our modern life. Our human struggles defy time and place. They are constant and universal. Works of art like this do not exist outside of our emotional life. They capture and express our emotions in a way that makes them more understandable and accessible. Edith Wharton can still speak to me years after her death. A shard of her experience matches a small portion of my own life. I can see some of my experience in her's. This peak makes my life a little deeper and meaningful. This is why I read. 

168

I knew this goal was going to be very long term when I started, but the scale of that long term is starting to sink in. While I don't think about the entire mass of the books to read as one big thing to consume, 168 is a large number. I've read that many books over the last four years so it's definitely something that I can accomplish, but the number of books do not tell the entire story. There's a big difference between reading The Sister Brothers or a 007 book and Proust or Joyce. Short and easy to consume books take a few days. Harder titles can take months. Committing to those challenging books is hard. Taking on the challenge is the entire point of forcing myself to read them. My unread books represent unrealized aspirations. They are things that I want to do that remain to be done. It's the realization that my time to do these unrealized things is finiite and slowly ebbing away that drove me to commit to reading all my unread books in the first place. Some will be quick reads that are fun and easy (like Seveneves, my most recently completed title) while other will be challenging slogs that require a focused and concentrated effort (The Radicalism of the American Revolution falls squarely into this category. It's an extremely interesting book written by a true master of the material, but it's kind of boring and not the easiest book to read). 

The reading of the book, not just finishing it, is the entire point of picking it up in the first place. I want to have my horizons broadened and my mind expanded. I want to be shocked and amazed and made more aware of what is hidden and hard to see in our world. There's talking and there's doing. Buying the book is talking. Reading the book is doing. It's the reading that counts. It's the will to embrace the challenge and stick with it despite the difficulties and challenges that counts in this effort. The books will always be here, but I will not. Getting through these books helps me make the most of that limited time.