For the past year, I’ve been keeping track of the books I’ve finished, the films I’ve watched, the exhibits I’ve seen. There’s a retrospective urge here: to keep track of what I ingest, to know what’s shaping me culturally. It’s useful for end-of-the-year lists, which I neglected to put out in 2009. Now I have lists, and I’m not sure what to make of them.
My list-keeping is, of course, a deeply flawed project. In my books, the problems are legion. What “finishing” means, for example: the books that I haven’t finished are in some cases more important than the books that I ostensibly finished. I spent a lot of time last year reading Finnegans Wake, though claiming to finish that book would be an act of hubris more than even I could bear. Not every book that I do finish is finished in the same way: some take a lot of time, some are read knowing that I’ll have to re-read them, some are only given a cursory reading. I tend to finish the books that I start, which helps, though some readings take forever. There’s also the question of what constitutes a book: a handful of the poetry chapbooks I read over the past year are well under 64 pages and could be read a few times in an hour. I’m in the midst of reading Anthony Powell’s A Dance to the Music of Time, a cycle made up of twelve novels most commonly available in four volumes; I’ve read one of the volumes, meaning three of the novels. It counts as three books, though I wonder if that’s cheating; if I’d finished the whole thing, I’d count it as a single book. Books that I re-read count; books that I read more than once in the year only count once. The same problems happen with film – for fear of making the whole thing unmanageable, I didn’t include television or the countless things I saw on YouTube, though I included short films, mostly. The rules end up being arbitrary on some level.
What do you end up with? Numbers, first: I read 232 books in 2009, of which 119 were fiction, 49 were poetry (here the boundaries are a bit fuzzy), and 64 fall into the nebulous category of non-fiction. 49 of those books, or 21%, were translated into English. I watched 164 films, went to 199 galleries and exhibits. Probably there’s some way to get my last.fm account to tell me how many MP3s I listened to on my computer last year, but I haven’t figured out how yet. I suspect I’d be terrified by the number.
What do these numbers mean? I had a sense that I was behind on my film-viewing for the year: I know there were movies that came out that I meant to see, that I knew I probably should see, and yet I didn’t see. Is seeing a film almost every two days very much? Susan Sontag thought she should she two films a day to be educated; I’m no Sontag. My friend who’s a film critic regularly sees three a day, which tests my imagination. My Netflix queue is at exactly 400 right now; if I keep up this rate and don’t see anything in the theaters, I could finish it off in May 2012. That won’t happen.
Similarly, my reading. 49 books of poetry comes to almost one a week, which seems like a lot. Still, I don’t feel like I’m even close to caught up with where things are in the contemporary poetry world. I made my way through two books of fiction a week. I like fiction; but of that list, only 12 were published in 2009, and a couple of those were reprints. It’s hard to defend making a top-ten of the year’s fiction when you’ve read that little that’s new. I’m not suggesting that there weren’t ten good novels published last year – there almost certainly were. I was busy reading other things, I guess.
It’s hard to keep up in a world so full of media. It would be very easy to put together a top-ten list of the books I read last year, the movies I saw, the exhibits I visited – but those lists would be more subjective than we usually think of end-of-the-year lists as being. We’re perpetually behind. Do lists help? I don’t know. Umberto Eco in a recent interview:
The list is the origin of culture. It’s part of the history of art and literature. What does culture want? To make infinity comprehensible. It also wants to create order – not always, but often. And how, as a human being, does one face infinity? How does one attempt to grasp the incomprehensible? Through lists, through catalogs, through collections in museums and through encyclopedias and dictionaries. There is an allure to enumerating how many women Don Giovanni slept with: It was 2,063, at least according to Mozart’s librettist, Lorenzo da Ponte. We also have completely practical lists – the shopping list, the will, the menu – that are also cultural achievements in their own right.
My lists aren’t cultural achievements. But the urge to create order: that makes sense for a new year.
[...] things I have written: some posts for if:book (1, 2, 3); a short post for the Hotel St. George blog on end-of-the-year lists; and, most interesting, an interview with [...]
I recall a passage from Perec’s “Species of Spaces” – or, if not the passage itself, at least the gist – where he meditates on the deep pleasure we receive from itemized lists. Making lists, reading lists, the mere fact that there are lists. Indeed, is there not something almost spiritually comforting about organizing things in meaningful ways? The inclusion of the word “species” in Perec’s title gestures to this: that there are detailed categories and phyla for pretty much everything that human beings think about should tell us something about the mind and the need for order. I recently finished a fascinating book called “Naming Nature,” by Carol Yoon, that explains the universality of classification systems. Apparently, all cultures have highly developed taxonomies, just as they have language and mystical rites and other customs. Levi-Strauss touches upon this in “The Savage Mind.” He saw a series of significant homologies in the various ways in which superficially different cultures classified the natural world, and believed they sprung from an innate ability to “put things in their place.” More and more, evolutionary science seems to be supporting that theory.