radfrac_archive_full

I hear about books on podcasts, or I think about them in passing, or suddenly stop dead on the sidewalk remembering how compelled I felt by the very idea of them: then I put these books on hold at the library. The books arrive, and either I have forgotten why I wanted to read them, or I've lost the urge, or -- if it really is something I definitely want to read or to have read -- I'm too intimidated to begin*. They sit on my counter for three weeks; I renew them; three weeks later I renew them again; then I return them, usually a day or two late, having read a couple of pages on the way to the library and thought some variant of "Hey, this is kind of interesting." Sometimes I put them on hold again.

I've been through this cycle with Infinite Jest once before. This time, when the book came in (I forget what inspired the hold), I thought I'd actually have a go at it, since it is certainly a Want to Have Read. So I am now approximately 7% of the way through IJ, though if I want to read it all before the hold runs out, I'll have to consume a cramming-level number of pages per day (ppd).

It helps that I'm already three books deep in the stack of butterflied current reading, meaning that starting IJ is a kind of special procrastination, though not of anything imposed on me from outside, except maybe that I'm joining the classics reading group in August and am supposed to have finished The Guermantes Way by then and instead of beginning with GW since I have audiobooked both Swann's Way and In a Budding Grove, I am re-reading (or anyway re-consuming) IaBG on paper, and I'm only 33% through Part I.

I may yet close the circuit. I hope so. Some of the books are short and it would really take only an afternoon's push to finish each one.

Reading for school choked my external reading urge -- I felt too much anxiety to read anything for pleasure when I could/should be running over once again the thought-loops in my head that I was trying to translate into a readable master's paper -- and too anxious to do that either. Now I can read what I like, and I miss having an external force determining my path through language. I mean, an additional external force. Or maybe I mean externalized.

Anyway. Infinite Jest: so far pretty good. There's a story I want to tell about it and podcasts, later.

{rf}

*I've only heard one writer talk about this kind of reading anxiety, on the BBC, and I've forgotten her name, though she's the only person who ever expressed this kind of secret shame-thing of mine, that sometimes I am too anxious even to read the thing I want to read, although I have been supposed, on various occasions by various people, to be Clever.

Although, or you know, perhaps because: but that seems facile. It seems like there has to be More to It than that, though the More is maybe just chronic anxiety about everything ever, or else deep-seated issues that can't be resolved except with more therapy than I can currently afford. If therapy is even still a thing people do.