How many books?
Years ago, my friend and writer David Gessner said he’s always reading a bunch of books at once, which I couldn’t quite wrap my arms around given the way I tend to read one book at a time. Still, I have since that day pictured Dave sitting in a comfortable chair with a stack of hard covers piled up next to him, and for the first time, feel a bit like Dave with four or five books going at once, all of them interesting but very different.
There’s Patti Smith’s A Book of Days, comprised of three hundred and sixty six pages each featuring a picture she’s taken, paired with a written reflection about it. I fell in love with Patti a couple of months ago after years of not being all that attracted her music. Upon picking up and reading her memoir Just Kids, this all changed. A Book of Days doesn’t read like a book, more like drops of water hitting the surface of a perfectly still pond. I only turn one page a day, which means I will have her with me for the next six months. There’s something comforting about this.
I’m also reading a book about ADHD called fittingly, ADHD 2.0, but Dr. Edward Hallowell and John Ratley. One in five people suffer ADHD, and to some degree we all think we understand what it is, until you take a deeper dive into the illness. There are eleven attributes to describe someone suffering from ADHD. Eleven! When I read these out loud to Mary, we recognize them all as behaviors we’ve encountered in the family, and are glad to be on a path to managing this debilitating illness.
Today, I started reading a novel by Haruki Murakami because his own book on writing resonated in such a way I felt compelled to read his fiction. He describes his voice as simple, almost boring, and talks about the furor his work created in Japan when the literary establishment thought him irrelevant and not worthy of being called a serious writer. He ignored them, and has risen to be translated in fifty languages. I want to hear his voice.
Lastly, I’m reading The Creative Act by Rick Rubin, who as it turns out is also in the music business, like Patti Smith. He’s a producer, and credited with helping popularize hip-hop. I’d picked-up his book once before, because the cover caught my attention—simple white hard cover book with a what looks like a target on the front comprised of a single circle with a black dot in the center, like something you might shoot an arrow towards. I’d picked it up once before, but didn’t purchase it until it appeared on the shelf of the 100 favorite books at the Booksmith. In it, Rubin deconstructs the creative mind, explaining in simple terms what it means to be an artist.
Four books taken in at once, no wonder our New Yorker magazines languish in a pile on the coffee table. I find I can’t read the New Yorkers when I have a book going, let along four. Maybe I’m the one suffering from undiagnosed ADHD, or maybe I just can’t make up my mind. I’m committed to writing my own book, and have started in on it only to have stopped about a third of the way in, not sure of what it’s exactly about. Believe it or not, this doesn’t worry me, not yet. I’m still finding my way, and each of these books helps in some fashion. All of the books I pick-up help to shape my own voice.
Books can take so many forms, which I see in the four I’m juggling right now. A book of reflections. A book of facts. A novel. A book on creativity. Four completely different ways to inspire, all now floating around in my head at the same time. They are completely unrelated, and yet all share the same basic form — pages bound between two covers, someone’s take on the world, shared with anyone so interested in the topic their covers describe.
How many books do you read at once?
