Just as most of the people we encounter across a lifetime mean nothing to us and will not even linger in memory, as they stir neither distaste nor devotion, so it is with books and writers. Had I been one of those desperately obsessive readers who records every title read, I might find such a list diverting, though the most interesting part would be all the books I no longer remember having read.
Likely more
important are several other categories: writers we first read as children and
continue to read as adults; former enthusiasms that have fizzled; writers
encountered late in one’s reading life who become central. In that third group
is a French writer, Jules Renard, whose journals have come as a refreshing, not
guilty pleasure. It has to do with
temperament. Renard (1864-1910) is one of literature’s nonpareils, a genuine
human novelty. Years ago I first read the excerpts included in The Journal of Jules Renard (1964), edited and translated by Louise
Bogan and Elizabeth Roget. Now we have Journal
1887-1910 (trans. Theo Cuffe, selected and introduced by Julian Barnes,
riverrun, 2020), which I keep an easy reach from my desk as I write.
Renard survived a difficult childhood but has a way of reducing life to essentials and making it sound amusing if not terribly exciting. His sense of humor is boundless and he never exempts himself from it. He’s pretension-free and utterly independent-minded. Who in the Anglophone world does he recall? No one precisely but I hear faint echoes of Mencken, perhaps Ambrose Bierce, but those names are misleading. Renard is a thoroughly rural character, raised in the Nièvre region. Though sophisticated without being snotty about it, he enjoys playing the rube. The Cuffe translation of the entry for December 10, 1909 consists of twenty-two observations, mostly devoted to mortality. All are pithy and many qualify as aphorisms. Here are three:
“Now that I
am mortally ill, I should like to make a few profound, historical utterances,
which my friends will subsequently repeat; but then I start to get overexcited.”
“To have
reached an age where the death of others no longer surprises.”
“Already I
am developing a taste for strolling in cemeteries.”
Renard would die five months later, on May 22, 1910, at age forty-six.
When I complete this month of December 2023, I'll have a 50-year record of the books I have read starting in the middle of my freshman year of college. I was able to recall much of my earlier reading around that time too, from scraps and memories.
ReplyDeleteThis list has been useful to me as a (now retired) English teacher, in discussions with friends who like to read, and as a spur and corrective for memories of non-reading matters. For example, if I want to figure out when it was that my young bride and I rode Amtrak on that long journey, I can look up the date of when I was reading Anna Karenina to her. (I admit that reading Anna Karenina, of all things, to your wife on a train journey is tempting fate in more ways than one.) And so on.
I originally kept the reading log in notebooks, but transferred that information to a digital document that I have updated in subsequent years.
One real benefit of having the list is that it prompts feelings of gratitude, for so many good books over the years, so many literary companions. It's something not utterly akin to "Bless the Lord, o my soul, and forget not all his benefits."
Dale Nelson
The gratifications of keeping a running list of one's reading have been surprising. I started it because I didn't trust my memory alone, but just scanning through the list from time to time evokes little jolts of remembered pleasure. The fact that I may not remember in any detail (or at all) the content of any given book turns out to be not as horrifying as I expected it might be. (Incidentally, I keep the List of Books Cal Has Read as a page in my blog, so I can refer to it - for whatever reason, and there are several persistent ones - conveniently.
ReplyDeleteCal, yes! Something I wish I'd kept a record of, and which would have been easy to do had I thought of it in time, is the books I have checked out from libraries over the years, even if I didn't end up reading them. I don't really regret not having done so, but I'd especially like to know about the books I checked out when I was a kid before I started buying books for myself more than rarely.
ReplyDeleteBut there's a scholarly article from decades ago about the record of the library books checked out by Nathaniel Hawthorne. I might have accidentally tossed it out when I retired from teaching. How interesting it would be to have such records of various favorite authors. I don't know what is the typical period (if there is one) for public libraries in the States to keep such records -- particularly in the pre-digital age.
DN