The Books I’ll Never Read

 

The books I’ll never read.

This is not a thought that ever drifted near my mind when I was floating through boyhood. I wasn’t much of a reader early in my life. I devoted my time to playing with my friends, riding my bike, watching TV, avoiding homework.

I wasn’t much more admirable later on. I pretty much read only when I was bored (i.e., not allowed to watch TV or sitting in study hall—my “avoid-homework” imperative remained firmly in place). And then of course, there were basketball and baseball and school plays, and hanging out with my friends and/or girlfriends.

Reading time again confined to enforced boredom time.

That began to change in college. I’d been bright enough to get into college—well, bright enough and the son of a professor who taught there.

But once I got into college, I soon encountered the question: What are you going to do with yourself now?

Lots of potential majors I eliminated because I simply couldn’t do them (math, sciences); others, because I just couldn’t see myself spending the rest of my life doing those sorts of things.

So I basically fell into an English major because I found (how?) that I could read all right (how?), and I could write all right (how?). And I had an especially great professor, Dr. Ravitz, whom I had for seven courses, and it is he whom I credit for lighting the fuse.

Soon I was reading ravenously—mostly, at first, in American lit.

And Dr. Ravitz also nudged me toward that idea of reading a writer’s complete works—to get a better idea of what he/she was up to.

I became an English teacher—and, later—a book reviewer.

I reviewed a few hundred books for the Cleveland Plain Dealer, and I really tried to read as many other works as I could by each author. It seemed to me, you see, that I needed to tell the readers of the review where this new book fit with the older ones.

With Kirkus, that just wasn’t possible: I was reviewing at least a book a week for them—too much to permit much diving into other works. (I ended up doing 1563 for them before my poor body said, “That’s enough!”)

Meanwhile, I continued the “Ravitz Method” in my personal reading—and as a result I have read the complete novels of Dickens, Trollope, Thackeray, Wilkie Collins. And I always tried to read all the works of authors who had written books I was teaching—Hemingway, Faulkner, Poe, Twain, et al.

Now, at home, retired, I’m reading the works of contemporary writers as they come along to me: Alice Adams, Elizabeth Strout, Maggie O’Farrell, Kate Atkinson, Rachel Kushner, Ian McEwan, Philip Roth, Paul Auster, Richard Powers, and on and on.

But I’m running out of gas, and I realize I’m not ever going to read all the books there are (hah!), not even all the books I want to.

And that, my friends, is a sad, sad thought ...