6+ Months, No New Books

Okay, okay, MOSTLY no new books…

I haven’t bought a book in six months and sixteen days, which if you know me at all, is very nearly unbelievable. You may be wondering: How?? How indeed…

A couple summers ago, my dear friend Maddie discovered a personality assessment called The Four Tendencies that some woman named Gretchen Rubin came up with. Gretchen is a NYT bestselling author, podcaster & speaker. She describes herself on her website as “one of today’s most influential and thought-provoking observers of happiness and human nature,” which feels like a crazy claim but okay, Gretchen.

Anyway according to her, there are four types of people: upholders, who respond well to both internal and external expectations, obligers, who meet external expectations but struggle to meet the expectations they set for themselves, questioners, who need to understand why they should meet an expectation before they’ll do it (i.e. all expectations become internal expectations), and rebels, who resist expectations entirely. I’m a questioner (according to Gretchen’s free quiz) which generally means that once I decide to do something, I do it, and in December, I decided to go an entire year without buying any books.

Additionally, two key things have helped me maintain my resolve over the past six months and sixteen days. First, I own approximately 100 books that I’ve never read before, and on top of that another ~150 good ones that I have read but could read again if I so choose! These are estimates as I’ve never actually counted. I may be way off as I’ve never been good at guessing how many pennies are in the jar etc., but the point is that I’m not starved for reading material. Second, I’m having fun!

I thought I might have some ~key takeaways~ to impart at or around this half year milestone, but truth be told, I don’t. Of the books I’ve read off my own shelf so far, some have proven to be spectacular (why did I wait!?). Others have been whatever (my lack of eagerness to read after initial purchase was prescient). Most have been good to great, none really have been very bad, and that is because I have good taste.

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You can find all my reviews of these mostly great books grouped by month here. Thus far, my favorites have been:

• The Little Friend by Donna Tartt

• Loved and Missed by Susie Boyt

• The Charterhouse of Parma by Stendhal

• Painting Time by Maylis de Kerangal

• The Morgesons by Elizabeth Stoddard

• Wild Ducks Flying Backward by Tom Robbins

• Jitterbug Perfume by Tom Robbins

Honorable mentions to Dune for being outside my normal wheelhouse and still a total delight. Also maybe for being the longest languishing book of all. On the Calculation of Volume IV should probably also be on my list of favorites, but I feel that as part of a series, it’s hard to distinguish my love for it from my existing love for the three books I’d already read, and besides that it never languished at all (more on this BREACH OF PROTOCOL below).

Interestingly Tom Robbins was the only author that I was sufficiently taken with to want to read two of his books in a row. Among the authors I’ve read so far this year, I also own other books by Hemingway, Didion, Marilynne Robinson, D.H. Lawrence & Virginia Woolf. In fairness to these listed authors, I think they’re wonderful. When it comes to choosing books, I’m just more likely to jump from one thing to another than I am to dive deeper (whether in regard to theme, time period, author, etc.).

The book I least enjoyed was Lies and Sorcery by Elsa Morante, and I’m sorry for that. I’m just not that into abject misery.

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Interlude to admit that while I have not bought any books in the strictest sense, I have acquired a few:

I procured a copy of Colu Henry’s fabulous cookbook Better at Home. I did this by preordering it last year, forgetting about it, and then getting a call from my bookstore telling me that it had arrived. This does not count. The cookbook is great; I shared a recipe here.

My friend Karen kindly bought me a copy of Love & Fame by Susie Boyt after reading about how much I enjoyed Loved and Missed and how saaaad I felt about that fact that none of Boyt’s other novels are available in the US. Karen brought Love & Fame to me all the way from London! We don’t look a gift horse in the mouth in this house.

I picked up two books off the street in April. These were Love Among the Haystacks and Other Stories by D.H. Lawrence, which I have already read, and Light in August by Faulkner which I have not. There was also a copy of short stories by Roald Dahl that I would have picked up if not for the other lady walking town the street who swooped in and grabbed it before I could.

My darling mother has struggled enormously with the premise of my project, so if you feel badly for anyone in this situation, it should be her—cruelly thwarted in her goal to always be buying books for me. A couple of allowances have been made. First, Always Home by Fanny Singer, which she bought for me at our friend Troy’s new cookbook store, Wild Sorrel Cookbooks. Then, after I posted about wanting to read it, Constable’s Year by Susan Owen’s. Thank you, Mama.

Because I’m not perfect, I was planning to subtly imply to my sister Kathryn that I would enjoy it if she bought me a copy of On The Calculation of Volume IV. She read my mind before I could even drop my hints. She also acquired something called The Butter Book for me, which I haven’t even properly flipped through, but which I love for the fact that it looks like a stick of butter.

On food & cookbooks, I also saved Erin O’Brien, author of unoriginally titled but enticing nonetheless cookbook, Dig In!, from losing a sale. I was over at my Baba’s when she informed me that she’d be sending her copy back, since there weren’t that many recipes in it that looked good to her, and she’d already photocopied the few that did. When I saw how hefty the stack of those ‘few that did’ photocopies was, taking this book for myself and thus eliminating the possibility of a wrongful return just seemed like the right thing to do. You are WELCOME Erin.

Finally, I signed up for a little workshop taught by Sonia Feldman back in February, and a copy of her debut novel Girls Girl was included in the cost of the course. It arrived in my mailbox last week.

Interlude concluded.

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There are so many books left to be read. Here are a few that call to me at the moment:

Thoughts, pleas, warnings?

That’s all for now, xx.

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