A New Page

I’m not sure if I’d ever made a firm New Year’s resolution before this January 1st. By “firm,” I mean something specific and measurable. Just about every year I vaguely resolve to “be a better person.” Twelve months later I make the same pledge because I feel pretty strongly I haven’t achieved that goal and had best give it another try. And anyway, shouldn’t I always want to be a better person?

But without specific benchmarks, it’s hard to tell if I’m making progress. What would those benchmarks be? “Increase compassion by 50%?” “Confine self-indulgent whining to two e-mails and one conversation per week?” The former seeks to quantify the unqualifiable, and the latter strikes me as frankly impossible.

I’ve felt for some time that I need to read more books. I read the Washington Post every day, the Sunday New York Times, and The New Yorker and other magazines as the mood and subject matter suit me. But books, not so much. Maybe three to five any given year. I’m a slow reader with lousy retention. And I often read at night, when I’m tired. Thus, I spend a lot of time rereading the same 10 pages I’d perused before I dozed off. I have friends who devour 10 books a month and can quote favorite passages from each. By contrast, it can take me months to finish a book, and by a few weeks afterward I’m incapable of sharing much more from memory than whether or not I liked it. By then, all but the broadest outlines of the plot and maybe a single main character’s name have escaped me.

For this reason, intricately plotted genres that demand strong powers of recall, such as mysteries, are non-starters. For me, it isn’t so much a matter of putting the pieces together as it is scrambling to gather together and store the pieces for later placement. It’s like trying to complete a jigsaw puzzle with half the box’s contents missing.

Resolving to read more books—20 in 2011 in my case—of course does nothing to address my retention issues. Even if I achieve my goal, the upshot presumably will be that I’ll end the year with the vaguest recollection of many more books than I typically do over the course of 12 months. Still, I feel good about having set a firm goal. And reading 20 books has got to be enriching, right? Well, no, of course it doesn’t. I could meet the letter of the resolution by reading a bunch of trashy crap with large type and few pages. But I won’t do that.

Now, I’ll concede that War and Peace is nowhere on my radar. I’ll save that one for the year I resolve to actually be a worse person—constantly blowing off people who need my help by yelling “I’ve got to reread pages 910 through 920 right now if I’m to have a prayer of finishing this f*cking tome by December 31st!” But I do intend to dig into a stack of “substantial” books, both fiction and nonfiction, that I’ve been given as gifts. These are well-reviewed books that promise to be interesting and perhaps illuminating.

In fact, I’ve already finished my first book: You Don’t Look Like Anyone I Know, by Heather Sellers. It’s a fascinating, harrowing and often humorous memoir by a woman who has the rare neurological condition known as prosopagnosia, or face blindness. She spent roughly the first 40 years of her life thinking she was crazy because she often couldn’t recognize faces, even of loved ones. When she finally was diagnosed, she not only was relieved, but also grateful for a disorder whose distancing effect had helped her survive a dysfunctional family life with a mother who may have been a paranoid schizophrenic and a father who was a drunk.

(An aside: The last book I read in 2010, The Glass Castle, by Jeanette Walls, also is a powerful memoir about surviving a dysfunctional family. Damn my own parents for raising me without so much as a trace of madness or rancor—on a Rockwellian suburban cul de sac, to boot. Where’s my harrowing survival story? I’d have to call my memoir I Looked Like Everyone You Knew. Try finding a publisher for that.)

When I told Lynn I’d resolved to read 20 books by year’s end, she supportively observed that seemed a bit ambitious for a guy who tends to labor over the Sunday comics. Still, I’m kind of pumped about it. Some books already are in the house and indelibly on the list. Other titles I’ll likely add along the way. It’ll be a mix of novels, essay collections, biographies, history books, short story collections and who knows what else. OK, maybe a sports book or two, but no complete pulp will be eligible for inclusion in the Group of 20.

By the final day of the year I’ll be one well-read guy. Better read, anyway. Just don’t ask me for details about any of the books. I will be able to give you a list of every title, though. That much I’m writing down.