Book Lover's Attention Deficit Disorder: So Many Books, So Little Time

I haven't posted in over a month and I'm laying the blame squarely on a disorder that catches up with all avid readers sooner or later. I like to call it "Literary ADD," and it's driving me crazy.

My job submerges me in a sea of books, books about books, blogs about books, and any number of related blurbs about books, day in and day out. Suddenly, after years of thoughtful and well-paced book consumption, I've lost all sense of self control and selectivity in my personal reading habits. I'm like an acquisitive chimpanzee in a room full of bright and shiny objects. The resulting stockpile of borrowed books on, under and behind my bedside table has grown to insane proportions. As soon as I open one book, I begin weighing the relative merits of an alternative choice. I switch books. After three pages, I hesitate, and decide that the alternative book doesn't quite fit my mood for the evening. I switch books again. The new book is good, but it's going to require a lot of concentration. I stare restlessly at the hill of books. I love them all! I must read them all! I sigh and turn on the television. Obviously, something's gotta give.

What's to be done about the delicious, but maddening, cornucopia of books at my fingertips? I haven't encountered this paralyzing blend of infinite choice and limited time since my parents plopped me down inside the gates of Disneyland and told me to "go for it," with the proviso that we would be leaving promptly at 5 p.m. for dinner and a sensible bedtime.

Several options have occurred to me:

1. Read more frequently.

This is out of the question if I want to live in reasonably hygienic surroundings and engage in any semblance of normal social life.

2. Read faster.

I've decided that this is ultimately unsatisfying. It defeats the very purpose of recreational and/or "deep" reading. I had to master the art of speed reading in order to survive law school, and it has taken me years to shake off the nasty habit of racing through text like a scholastic sprinter, mercilessly scanning each paragraph in search of the "take away point." Speed reading is the equivalent of taking one of those twelve-day "Highlights of Europe" package tours. You know for a fact that you were in Luxembourg on Wednesday, but all you can remember is that you had heartburn after lunch.

3. Read fewer, but better, books.

There are numerous readers' advisory sources that will recommend the best new books of the month, Critics' Top Ten of the Year, The Best 25 Books of the New Century, The Classic 100, etc. At first blush, this seems like a reasonable strategy for winnowing your reading list into a manageable, select collection. Don't be fooled. I can tell you from recent experience that these sources will exacerbate the problem.

To begin with, if you discover that a book is listed as one of the "100 Best Books of the Century," how can you NOT read it? Don't you owe it to yourself to at least check it out? Come to think of it, shouldn't you read all 100 in the interest of thorough edification? And what about book number 101? Is it really that less worthy of your time than book 100? You can't win this game.

Secondly, many of the shorter lists contain a brief, glowing description of the book which justifies why the critics think it is a must-read. These snippets are frequently so tantalizing that they compel you to explore a book that you initially considered to be easily dispensable in the interest of efficiency. This (and the fact that I'm totally out of control) explains why I seriously considered adding "Chasing Kangaroos: A Continent, A Scientist, and a Search for the World's Most Extraordinary Creature" to an already bloated list of must-reads. (Don't get me wrong -- I think Tim Flannery is a fantastic science writer, but there are only so many hours in the day, and I can't spend them chasing kangaroos, even if his book made the "Best 10 Science Books of 2007" list, etc.)

Finally, readers' advisory sources are so varied and bounteous that they themselves have become unmanageable -- thus the advent of websites with names like "The Review of Reviews." It never ends.

4. Throw everything out, start from scratch, and hope for the best.

Within the course of this week, I'm going to return all of my borrowed books. All of them. Period. Out of sight, out of mind, just like spooning the last half of that chocolate cake down the disposal. Next, I'm going to form a "reading plan" and pursue it in depth. More about this in a future blog post. All I'm willing to divulge at this point is that the plan involves limiting my bedside book cache to a maximum of three fiction books and three nonfiction books at any given time. Sigh. Wish me luck.