I Read Therefore I List
Here’s a bookworm confessional I wrote for the Victorian Writers Centre last month. Surely I’m not alone in this perversion?!
We are what we read, or so I read somewhere. Not sure where. I’ll need to check my booklist. Because privately, persistently, I’ve kept a tally on every book I’ve read – from AA Milne to ZZ Packer – for over 25 years. A grab-bag chronology of classics and crud, from Thomas hardy to Cliff Hardy, plays and anthologies, Le Guin to Le Carre, poetry and research – over 1200 titles that go towards suggesting who I might be.
Obviously obsessive, for one. The habit began with George Orwell. Midway through a uni major, exploring Orwell’s oeuvre, I jotted down the titles as I went. Soon the impulse became a custom, a kind of memory prompt that became handier the longer the list grew.
A lifetime later, the memory motive burns even brighter. Booklists guard against the vagueness we inherit as bus routes and Soprano subplots jostle the brain. (I know I’ve dabbled in a Margaret Drabble – but which?) A shopping list in reverse, a booklist identifies the snacks once you’ve gobbled them.
But there’s also memory of the bio kind. Peter Carey’s Bliss is number 14 in the tally. Just to see that title whisks me back to a Sydney train, 1982, the silver hardback in my lap, a jacaranda blur outside the window”¦
Bone People – the wondrous one-hit by Keri Hulme – is a hammock in Mexico. The Brothers Karamazov revives Belize, the sort of republic with enough time for Russian masters. Meanwhile The Big Nowhere, a forgettable thriller by Jeffery Deaver, is a post-wedding hangover in Albury.
(Not my wedding I should add. That I recall beyond literature. Though my faithful list confirms I squeezed Dorothy Sayers and Haruki Murakami into the honeymoon.)
Art Garfunkel is a lister too. Open to browsers, his tally spans from his musical heyday in 1968 to now, the whole eclectic mishmash displayed on his website. Taking a squiz, I note Art’s list carries more Western canon, compared to my regular cannon fodder.
But that’s part of the fun, charting your appetite over the journey. In every journal – a diary per year – I jot down the titles as the months elapse. Do that for 20 years and you create an extended shelf to betray your reading binges, the fads and patterns, the droughts and spikes.
In 1995, for example, a sequence of campsite lulls while bumming round Australia, I read 58 books. Twenty have a noir lustre, with Walter Moseley and James Lee Burke the prime suspects. Crime was the craze back then, and I succumbed. (Though I notice the hard-boil is aerated by poetry – Les Murray and Lorca – and a Patrick White jag.)
Play it forward ten years – 2005 – and I slumped to 38 books, a symptom of writing my own book that year, a madcap project compiling an Australian trivia/travel guide. Yet a decade sees non-fiction steal crime’s top billing. (The best being Moneyball by Michael Lewis and AJ Jacobs’ The Know-It-All.) We are what we read – and when we live.
Importantly, a booklist outlines gaps. (What? No Faulkner? No, not yet. Have you read Henry Green?) By the same token, immersed in cocktail murmur, I’m spared the vice of pretending to know Sartre, or being Richard Flanagan’s faux-fan – as a reader I’ve indulged in neither. If push comes to shove, my list can be tendered as a legal document.
Not that I can recall every narrative to a jury’s satisfaction. You think I could tell you the first thing about People in Glass Houses by Shirley Hazzard? Or SS-GB by Len Deighton? All I can vouch is I’ve read them, allegedly. The list is my gospel.
But surely Garfunkel and I aren’t the only listers in life’s great lectorium? Aren’t all readers prone to the same twitch? After all, why keep books you’ve already read? To revisit them one day? To lend when the moment strikes? Yeah, right. The reason you hoard those Henning Mankells, or whichever series you’ve devoured, is also my reason for listing. Both reflexes furnish us with lines of literary scalps, the trophies in the hunt for self-understanding. A $1000 says you’re a booklister who doesn’t yet realise you’re a booklister.
(Monopoly money, naturally. So are ye a lister?)