A Thousand and One Tales (Plus Some): Keeping a "Books Read" Journal

I didn't start out as a reader.  That word better described my brother who could sit under a tree totally absorbed in Kidnapped or The Scottish Chiefs.  I preferred dawdling in our California sunshine, smelling the eucalyptus, and pretending I was a Scheherazade-like movie star as I harked back to some Sinbad film I'd just seen.  It was only later, on discovering the Travel and Adventure section of our public library, that I did more than read an occasional book.  I was maybe thirteen and longed to see the world so gobbled up Ginger and Dana Lamb's Enchanted Vagabonds about their canoe trip from California to Panama ... Lowell Thomas's journey from India to Lhasa via Sikkim rather than Nepal (because it was still a closed country).  By the time I started college, I was hooked on books.

"What are you going to major in?" some relative would ask.

"English Lit.  ...  I like to read."  In fact, I might have added that though I was already familiar with Brontë, Twain, Dickens, and I don't remember who-all, I figured it was time to familiarize myself with an expanded list:  Woolf, Wharton, Dreiser, James ... and on and on.

So, as a way of continuing my English Lit momentum, the day I got my B.A. (it was June 10, 1960), I decided to start a journal and list every book that I would read from that day on.  I wouldn't include those I merely skimmed.  Or those I didn't finish (like, just recently, Annie Proulx's Bird Cloud).  And there were a few years when--finally doing some adventuring of my own--I didn't keep proper records.  Or, raising a child, I read very little.  But though I didn't record books I didn't complete, I did double- or triple-note a book I re-read.  (The three I read the most--four times--turned out to be Lawrence Durrell's A Smile in the Mind's Eye, Rumer Godden's The River, and Marian Mountain's The Zen Environment.  One about Taoism, one with a taste of Hinduism, and one about Zen.)

I also started a new page with each new year.  And I habitually wrote out a very short description.  For example, Stories by Elizabeth Bowen, yielded this comment in 1965:  "Short stories of hedge-rows and chicken livers for lunch."  Or The Portrait of a Lady by Henry James:  "What a waste of a good lady!"

Then last June--fifty years since graduation--I typed up a master list.  Or, rather, two master lists.  One was alphabetical by author with the title and the year read.  The other was a listing by category:  biography, fiction, memoir and autobiography, misc. (including art, food, health), general non-fiction, poetry and plays, spirituality, travel and travel memoir, and books on writing.  I found that from June 10, 1960, to June 10, 2010, I'd read 1,023 books.  (With another 61 to date.)  (2010, incidentally, was my record-year with 65 books read.)

I like the orderliness of this sort of project.  I also like the historical aspect--might someone in, say, the 22nd century enjoy knowing the reading habits of someone in the 20th?  Then, too, if I have a vague recollection of a book, I can go back and check it out.  (A few now seem so obscure I barely remember reading them.)  I can also come up with various tallies that amuse me.  For instance, it turns out that I've read 7 books each by Jane Austen, Anita Brookner, and Natalie Goldberg.  8 each by Henry James and W. Somerset Maugham.  10 by Barbara Pym.  13 by Rumer Godden.  And 20 by Alexander McCall Smith.  (As some pursue Simenon or Agatha Christie, I've latched onto this Zimbabwean-Botswanaean-Scot.)

And though fiction and biography take up a good chunk, my favorite category seems to be memoir.  Just last year I read about a Tibetan rinpoche's escape in 1959, the flight of a member of Marie Antoinette's court to Albany, New York (of all places), Paul Theroux's journey by sea and train around the Mediterranean, an Australian family's hunt for an apartment in Paris, plus the tales of American women living in Cairo, Yemen, Damascus, and rural Japan.

If, in all this, anyone were to ask what my absolute favorite book is, I'd come up with two:  To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf.  Beautifully structured, highly intelligent, with a brilliant description of the impact of the mother's death on the family by detailing how their now-vacant summer house began falling apart over the years.

My Books-Read journal, master list, plus Woolf and Dinesen

And, Isak Dinesen's Out of Africa.  This is a pastoral, not a chronicle.  Her canvas is not herself but favorite topics--her servants, her bushbuck, her neighbors, Denys.  She speaks of the land, the Africans, the animals, much as if they were all part of a foreign court that she was privileged to visit for a time.  (Rather like life itself.)  Her writing is generous.  She does not indulge in complaint about herself or others.  She is the narrator, not the central character.  She hands that role to Africa.

As Scherherazade engaged her listener with woven tales and bits of fantasy, Dinesen draws her reader in with stories of djinns, Fata Morgana mirages, the Roc.  And beautiful language.  When labeling "the loveliest dyes of Arabia and Somaliland," she calls them "carmoisin, prune pure, Sudan brown, rose bengale and Saffranine."  And describing an evening on the Masai Reserve, she writes:  "... and over our heads, to the West, a single star which was to grow big and radiant in the course of the night was now just visible, like a silver point in the sky of citrine topaz.  The air was cold to the lungs, the long grass dripping wet, and the herbs on it gave out their spiced astringent scent.  In a little while on all sides the Cicada would begin to sing.  The grass was me, and the air, the distant invisible mountains were me, the tired oxen were me." 

Think about starting a Books Read journal.  It's easy, fun, and informative.