370 and counting

I'm not sure how it happened but I'm currently addicted to entering books on Goodreads. I've had an account for several years never thinking much of it even though I do have a long (as in decades) held desire to know how many books I've read in a year and to be able to keep track of which books I've read overall. Maybe I'd finally had enough of it, enough not knowing. Or maybe I'm reaching out for some sort of meaning, to construct something which says, "I've lived" or "I'm here!" or "My life counts--see how many books I've read." Whatever the deeper fucked up psychological reason, it doesn't really matter much why. I enjoy inputing the books, sometimes scanning a book I haven't touched in years, seeing my notes at the beginning (e.g. "1998 Thanksgiving Rexburg," "Book club 11/2008"), remembering my motivations for reading.

And I'm noticing patterns. There is a small spike in more serious nonfiction titles in 1999, which didn't make sense to me at first. But then, duh, I realized I finished my master's degree in 98 and then all of sudden had all this intellectual curiosity and also some time. That curiosity led me to many books (Kozol's Amazing Grace, Cahill's How the Irish Saved Civilization, Rodriguez's Hunger of Memor) and eventually led me out of teaching high school and to SLCC where I'm at now.

My actual reviews (if I enter one at all) are quite short but are less review, more reading autobiography. I've less interested in evaluated the books than of marking what the book meant to me at the time of reading. For example Kozol's Amazing Grace made me aware of poverty in a way I'd never been aware of before, made me feel in in my bones. Under my review for The Roadless Traveled, a book I'm unsure (maybe even afraid) how I would respond to now, I clearly situate the book in my life history:

"For a long time this was my personal Bible, my bulwark against Mormonism and religion. The section on love had a profound effect on me and continues to come to mind as an adult: real love is always based on the concern for another person's spiritual growth. e

My mom gave me this book, an amazing insightful move."

Having entered hundreds of books over the last few weeks, the supposed big events (graduations, LDS mission, girlfriends, jobs, houses) of my life grayscale into the background, allowing defined book covers into the foreground, which knit together my emotional and intellectual shifts and development.

It's an episodic, much less linear, representation of my life. For the moment it is a representation I intend to indulge in, savor, squeezing out the supposed milestones. I rather like seeing my life as stitched together passages about love and spiritual growth from the Road Less Traveled (read in 1986) with Kabat-Zinn's (read in 2009)ideas on mindfulness and accepting where one is. On one hand the two readers of these books, separated by 23 years seem impossibly distinct and distant; on the other hand both readers--the 17 year old unsure about his desires and the 40 year old unsure about anyone defining his desires--clearly come from the same self, the same self who has now for years found such pleasure and discovery through reading.