A Reading Ramble and Reigning it In

Is it possible for me to slow it all down, to read fewer books, to sink right into them? I don't know if it is possible. I find that I am very impatient. I find that it isn't enough for me to be actively reading five different books at one time. There's always the urge to add in just one more.

Yesterday I wanted to read Kierkegaard. Why? Because someone somewhere said something that sounded something like something that he once wrote, and that made me hunger for Kierkegaard.

The day before I was reminded of all these people I wanted to study: Chesterton, McDonald, Lewis. If you know much about C.S. Lewis you get the idea. All these guys wrote all these books and they are deep. Why reminded? Because I read Walter Hooper's introduction to Lewis's published poems. Hooper writes that many of Lewis's prose works began their life in verse, and I went "Whoah. There is so much of this man I still don't know." He wasn't a great poet, at least that's what I've been told, but he had a passion for narrative poetry I knew nothing about. That got me thinking of all these men whose writings I dearly want to know.

There's always a flood of books to read; I've written of this before, but it remains, there is always a flood, and time is short and attentions are divided, and this is why I cannot settle down into reading only one book at a time.

But then this morning I read an interview WC Banfield did with Bobby McFerrin at the end of McFerrin's year and a half sabbatical. It was a true sabbatical for him, a year and a half away from the work and the worry and the world, and he said he needed to sit and think and hear. He said he needed to figure out why he was doing what he was doing, whether he was being nourished by his work or being merely drained by it. I think this is something for us all to consider, though even the most nourishing work cannot be consistently nourishing.

Last month I read Richard Foster's latest book on meditative prayer. In one chapter he spoke of the difficulty of presence. I know that when I sit quietly my thoughts are always going somewhere very far away. It may be plans or questions or analyses, those strivings to make sense of your own life, and these are so distracting. These many multitudinous thoughts are a distraction. Sometimes you need to sit and be, and this is such a challenge for us. Sometimes when we are sitting quietly we want so desperately for God to speak that we interrupt Him and interrupt ourselves. We guess at what He might be saying so that it becomes impossible to hear.

God sends me books, and I am constantly amazed at the interconnectedness I find among them. Books are good. They can be very good. But they run riot in my life, and can verge on becoming interruption instead of life imparting force. Actually, I kinda like the interruption.

Last year I wondered what would happen if I chose one book and really drank it in, reading it and it alone in all those available moments. I thought it would be Annie Dillard's The Living, and it's true that it would be a very good one to read in such a way. Since then I've probably read fifty books, so you can see how well that worked.

We wake up in the morning and we try it again, don't we? For me, cutting back on the number of books I read at one time would be a great discipline. To start a new book is an impulse, and one I only rarely deny. It is mostly a good impulse. Mostly.