Ready, set, word vomit. I’m currently reading Ten Years in the Tub, a compilation of Nick Hornby’s “Stuff I’ve Been Reading” columns from The Believer. I’m barreling towards the end of the decade’s worth of columns, 50 pages from the end now, and pushing ahead with this sort of urgency and nervousness, because I’ve set myself the goal of READING MORE and READING AT LEAST ONE BOOK A MONTH and have failed multiple times this year already, and it’s making me nervous.

Read read read read read read read

My ‘homework’ this week is to read Gloria Anzaldua’s excerpt in the Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism, which is from Borderlands/La Frontera. Specifically “A New Mestiza” (or part of it).

It’s my homework because I’m trying to find pleasure in things again, because I selected this as something good to reach toward, something that would fill a particular hunger, something that I am afraid of.

So I’m reading around it, circling around and around until I’m prepared to drop into it.

Anyway, there’s this point in one of Hornby’s earliest columns where he reflects on reading, (actually, it’s the first sentence of the first column, so there you go. I don’t know why I thought it was a few columns in, a sort of awakening of the purpose of the column itself. Apparently not everyone tumbles into projects without quite knowing their purpose or structure the way I do.) “…about the way that, when reading is going well, one book leads to another and another, a paper trail of theme and meaning; and how, when it’s going badly, when books don’t stick or take, when your mood and the mood of the book are fighting like cats, you’d rather do anything but attempt the next paragraph or reread the last one for the tenth time ” (25).

For the past two and a half years, reading has pretty much been going badly, moving in fits and starts, when it moves, it if moves at all. There was A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius and The Great Bridge and then part of Devil in the White City (abandoned because I didn’t particularly want to read about women being dismembered, I wanted to read about figuring out how to build a skyscraper) and then just darkness, really. I don’t really remember what I read in between, although I remember reading Euphoria in huge gulping sections at an airport, on the plane, on the bus back from my home airport, and then Never Have I Ever in a similar way on a different trip. I remember reading Kavalier and Clay and wanting to thrust it into the hands of everyone I’d ever known, and that I started Revolutionary Road, but it was so bleak that it almost couldn’t be bourne … there was The Department of Speculation, which I loved but know I’ll have to reread if I hope to retain any of it, and All My Puny Sorrows which I loved so deeply too, which put Miriam Towes on my map, someone to return to, someone who speaks the same language. I started The Third Coast and On Photography, but had to return them both to the library too soon, but that was this year, so put a pin in that. I read Station Eleven at the end of last year, in dollops, horrified and mesmerized, and that sacrificial plane still haunts me. The year I moved into the first apartment of my own, I read Wild and most of Tiny Beautiful Things.

So it turns out I do remember – I really remember—what I read between the first month of post-college life and now. I remember even if I’m embarrassed at the paltry list. I remember because I hold reading in such a particular position in relation to myself. Reading is how I made my way through the world when I was young, and how I hid from it when I was teen-aged, and now, as an adult, I long for the security I got from reading – but am suddenly slightly fearful, as if maybe it was all a hoax, and I never learned anything from books at all.

So I charged headlong into it this year, resolving to read more, making a promise to read at least one (but really two) books a month, making a list to keep track, and setting up a tally in my brain, ready to tip everything into guilt halfway through any given month. In some ways, this felt like a promise to read myself back to myself…but in others it felt like tricking myself into becoming a shadow of someone I used to be.

And so I’ve settled, somewhere near the bottom third of the year, half keeping up with my resolution, half padding the list with small collections of essays and graphic novels and memoirs. I’ve been plugging away at Ten Years in the Tub for 3 months now really, it’s absurd to keep reading this book about reading other books. But I take a kind of comfort in it. It’s so passive that there aren’t any stakes at all. I can watch someone doing a thing I love without having to commit to doing that thing I love. I can read about someone else’s reading and not have to stake any of my time, or personality, or decision making on that activity myself.

Although…there’s an undeniable joy in reading someone who loves reading. In hearing again and again arguments about the value of spending time with books you’re  enjoying instead of books the cool people say you should be enjoying. There’s a pleasure in encountering the same rallying cry – love what you love, and don’t be ashamed// disenchantment is not cool – across ten years of a project.

I finished Ten Years in the Tub last night, a little after midnight. I’m going to fudge the line a bit and claim it as an August read, even if it was read in June and July too. Even if technically it was September when I crossed that finish line.

Two books came in to the library, and I’ll pick them up this week, or this weekend. I’ll read that essay tonight and walk into tomorrow – feeling what? Accomplished? Absurd? Sad that things have shrunk so small? Proud? Embarrassed?

I’ll see when I get there.