Jack Me Up

Reading four books a week seems like a lot until you think about the number of books that actually get published in a year, not to mention how many millions already exist. If you read a book a day (which is very possible if you don’t work), you’d only get through a mere 365 books a year - a drop in the literary bucket. More books than that are produced in Montreal alone in that amount of time, which is paltry next to the figures for New York, London, or Paris. It’s a cliché to say it, but “so many books, so little time”. Actually, there’s a great volume about this very subject by Gabriel Zaid, called So Many Books: Reading and Publishing in an Age of Abundance. I recommend it.

Very often I ponder what it would be like to get books ‘jacked’ into my brain, à la Matrix. How awesome would it be to sit in a chair and download book after book into your memory? Whoa. You’d get started with the classics, I suppose, and then move on from there. While it’s true that the tactility of the experience would be lost, it would be worth it to be familiar with that vast a number of titles. You might even end up feeling like Harold Bloom.

I don’t think speed reading is the answer to this quandary, since I love language too much to not give it proper consideration. That said, I find it very difficult to be able to read only at the rate I do. If I got imprisoned in my house for some freaky reason, it would still take me five years at four-a-week to get through my personal library.

I guess I know how I’ll be spending my retirement. Too bad it’s several decades away.