Friday, June 06, 2008

As if I didn't have enough to do

A few months ago a friend showed me a book entitled “1,001 Books You Must Read Before You Die”. When the creators of the book include the words “must” and “die” there is a certain terminal urgency to the whole thing. So I felt compelled to explore my deficiencies.
The average life expectancy of a man today is around 75, leaving me 30 years to accomplish the task. It would be a bit less daunting if I had gotten a better start. I am going to optimistically give myself about 25 books accomplished from the list, leaving 976 to go.
I’ll have to read 32.5 books a year. That means 2.7 books a month, which means .68 books per week or .097 books per day. Now .097 books a day is fine if I am reading anything featuring talking pigs or such phrases as “the rugged stranger flexed his giant biceps to the ripping point to pull his sweating steed to a stop, just in time to see the raven haired beauty disappear through the convent doorway”. Those books aren’t included.
I started looking over the list, which is arranged chronologically from ancient to recent. The first book listed is “Aesop’s Fables”. Dude, I am on a roll. The second book listed is “Metamorphoses” by Ovid. Screeching halt to the roll takes place. I have heard of it and I probably read bits of it in college but I can’t count it. The third book is “Chaireas and Kallirhoe”…uncle.
One thing I’ve learned is it is not very likely you will run into someone who has actually read many of these books (unless you talk to my mother), so I have gotten good at faking it. I worked at bookstores during my lack of career days. (That is what happens when you have a degree in film studies from the University of Kansas.) I found if I read the blurbs on the back of the book I could actually carry on a short-lived yet intelligent sounding conversation about it.
Since the people in the immediate vicinity hadn’t even read the 257 words on the back cover I was seven or eight pithy comments ahead. I could spout at least one main character name, one plot point and, stealing from the Washington Post book reviewer quote, I could make a value statement pertaining to the author’s status as a giant amongst pre-World War Two existentialist thinkers. Top that! Just because I do not know anything else about the book or even what a pre-World War Two existentialist thinker is, I can then steer the conversation to “How ‘bout that Celtics game last night?” They’ll think I am both a well-read sophisticate (“He used the word ‘existentialist’ in a sentence”) and a man of the common folk (“He used the word ‘game’ in a sentence”).
Looking over the list showed me authors of the 1700s didn’t feel the need to be very creative with titles. Examples are “Robinson Crusoe”, “Joseph Andrews”, “Candide” (read it in high school and remember bits, so I counted it) and “The Monk” (long before anyone heard of OCD or private detectives).
The books on the top of my list as I attack this quest come from this time. The first one sounds like a cartoon from the late sixties: “Roderick Random”. Roderick is able to win because while the bad guys are trying to figure out why he went from reciting the lyrics to Roger Miller’s “You Can’t Roller Skate in a Buffalo Herd” to describing the mating rituals of the Philippine Red-vented Cockatoo (which would cause any self-respecting person to shake his head hard enough to create that noise Daffy Duck always made when he had to force his head back into the shape of duck’s head instead of the shape of a frying pan it had turned into when smashed over the head with one) he swoops in and saves the day.
The book which sounds the most intriguing to me has to be Denis Diderot’s “Jacques the Fatalist”. He has to be the literary father of Eeyore.
“Hey, Jacques, did you hear that a guy in England discovered a new planet and named it Uranus,” says a friend of Jacques’s, and it is not easy to be a friend of Jacques’s.
“Swell, not only will its name be a constant source of giggling in third grade science classes, but it will probably spin off of its axis and hurtle into Earth destroying life as we know it,” responds Jacques.
“Yeah…, sooo, how ‘bout that Celtics game last night?”

Christopher Pyle likes to read but has no desire to wade through “The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists” by Robert Tressel. I did not make that up. It’s on the list.

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