The Short List

One of the most interesting aspects of blogging for me is writing with the scary knowledge that others will be reading what I write from a personal perspective that is very different from mine. I like to think of this as other people "holding my feet to the fire", making me more accountable not only to myself but to them. I am aware that I need to scrutinize what I write with more care, being more certain that the words I choose are appropriate and that the they all come together in some sensible way. Even though we are in an age of massively overwhelming amounts of data, much of it is not really information, if by that we mean useful to the purposes of living a meaningful life. There is definitely pressure in all of our lives to consume information on a scale that, were it food, we would find ourselves massively obese and fundamentally disabled.

In light of this tendency for information consumption, for building a steady diet of new bytes and bites of data, it is counterintuitive to consider reading something we have already read and put aside. However, when one thinks back to the books that have made an impact on one's life, it is probably true that all of us could name at least one book that we would like to revisit. Maybe it was E. B. White's Charlottes' Web or (could this be true?) Melville's Moby Dick. I have caught myself saying "There is so much to read that rereading doesn't make much sense". I have a fondness for saying that "Life is short" and that serves as some sort of rationale for plowing ahead with the newly issued New York Times "bestseller". But these expressions don't ring true when it comes to rediscovering an old friend on the library shelf. Life is not so short that we can't welcome a new reading of a personal classic. Do we reject our old friends because they aren't young? Books from long ago are our elders. They contain some wisdom that has embedded itself in us and we honor their permanence by opening their covers. Wisdom is ever new and, in the case of what we glean from books, required reading.

All of us are amalgamations of influences we have accumulated over a lifetime and some of the most important are what we have gleaned from the books we have read. Even if we are ensconced in a livelihood that doesn't depend on reading, all of us have been formed by something we have read. An ongoing habit of reading brings us in touch with the minds of others whose life experiences overlap with ours in surprising and interesting ways. Of course, we won't be able to read everything on our lists of books, but we will be able to identify the books we have loved. It will be a much shorter list than the ones we have yet to crack open. It would be worth a few minutes of our time to compile our own short list of books that we might wish to reread.

 The old favorites will look very new and different in the light of where we now find ourselves moving through the thickets and paths of our daily lives. The fresh look we will get is just another good reason for starting over with them. Perhaps they have more to teach us, more to tell us about our memories and expectations for the future. Many well-thumbed books will now find us in different life circumstances, perhaps with children or partners or even grandchildren. We will read them silently or, better yet, aloud to a new audience that is evolving. The magic they held for us will be passed along to someone else and so it will go in the life of a good book. There won't be any winners or losers on our short lists. What books are on your short list?