It is the season of the reading wrap-up, when the internet fills with tidy numbers — 52 books! 104 books! — and I feel my annual obligation to file a report from the untidy side. Here is mine: this year I read fifty-one books, or forty-seven, or sixty-something, and I can defend every one of those numbers, which is the point of this note.
Fifty-one is the count in the notebook where I write down finished books. It is the official number, and it is a lie of precision. Forty-seven is the number if you disallow the four books I finished but had substantially read in previous years — long-abandoned books I finally closed out, which feels like it shouldn’t count the same as a fresh reading, though try telling that to The Recognitions, which I have now officially read and which took, in total elapsed time, six years. Sixty-something is the number if you count honestly by volume of attention: the books I read three-quarters of and set down with no intention of returning (they were finished with me, even if I wasn’t finished with them), the two enormous books I reread in part (does the middle third of Anna Karenina count as a book? it is longer than most books), the poetry collections I read the way one reads poetry, which is to say seven times and never once straight through.
The counting problem is not trivial, is what I’m saying. It only looks trivial if you think reading is a rope with books threaded on it like beads. Actual reading — anyone’s actual reading — is weather. It has fronts and stalls and unseasonable warmths. Some of my most important reading this year happened in books I did not finish and will not, including one I read forty pages of in a rented house and think about weekly. Some of my least important reading was in books I completed dutifully, cover to cover, retaining nothing but the completion. If the log counts the second kind and not the first, the log is measuring compliance, not reading.
And yet I keep the log. Have kept it for nine years now, and will keep it next year, because the alternative — no record at all — turns out to be worse. Years of reading disappear without a trace otherwise; the books sink into you and do their work, but you lose the sequence, and the sequence is sometimes the story. Reading the log for 2019, I can watch myself circling a decision months before I knew I was making it: the books get restless, then they get practical, then there is a suspicious cluster of memoirs by people who quit things. The log knew before I did. That is worth an entry a day and some annual embarrassment about arithmetic.
A few unnumbered superlatives, then, in place of a wrap-up. Best book I read this year: The Blue Flower, Penelope Fitzgerald, on the third try, and the failure of the first two tries was mine each time. Best rereading: The Warden, which gets funnier as I age into its middle-aged grievances. Book I most often pressed on customers in my bookstore years and finally reread to check my old enthusiasm: The Summer Book, Tove Jansson — enthusiasm confirmed, pressure will continue. Longest book finished: see above, six years, Gaddis. Shortest: a forty-page pamphlet on hedge-laying that I read twice in one sitting and have thought about, conservatively, once a week since. The pamphlet does not appear in the log. The log has never heard of the pamphlet. Fifty-one books, official. Ask me no further questions.