There was a book I mentioned a few posts back, Operation Wandering Soul, which I had said I had picked up to read a second time several months ago.
While that much certainly is true, I still haven’t actually finished that re-read. Nor have I finished my first time through one of Richard Powers’ other books, The Time of Our Singing (which means I can’t yet claim to have read all of his novels.)
Nor have I managed to finish reading It Can’t Happen Here, by Sinclair Lewis, although I’ve started it.
Also still unfinished is Mark Kurlansky’s Salt: A World History (and, no, I wasn’t put off this one by the fact that it apparently was on President Bush’s reading list this past Summer).
For some reason, over the past year or so, I am having a tremendous amount of difficulty finishing books, and almost never is this because I don’t think the books are worth the read. Somehow, I just get stuck and a moment hits where I put the book down and don’t pick it back up again.
Right there that’s at least four books which sit unfinished. If I rummaged around, it’s entirely likely that I could locate a few more.
During the run of my previous site, I accumulated and read a mammoth number of books about Portland history. So it’s not like I haven’t, in recent years, been reading a great deal. But for some as-yet-undetermined reason, I haven’t been able to follow through on this other short stack of books.
It’s not been unusual for my reading habits to follow patterns. Normally, it’d be the pattern of following a single author. Going on a Kurt Vonnegut re-read kick. Reading my first Powers book and then storming through the others. My one-time high-level mania for Milorad Pavic, which began with Dictionary of the Khazars.
Sometimes, the pattern is different. Salt is the perfect example of what I once termed “conceptual histories” — a genre I used as my guide for finding new things to read. It led me to The Nothing That Is: A Natural History of Zero, for example. As it turns out, I appear still to have an Amazon Listmania List for these sorts of books. Most of those on that list I still haven’t read.
Call it something of a literary ennui. An odd sort of listless restlessness when it comes to getting any reading done.
I would like to be reading something, but apparently I’ve become incapable of determining just what that something might possibly be.
