I used to have insane completionist fantasies. At eighteen, when I first entered the stacks of Harvard’s Widener Library, I thought how great it would be to start in the northeast corner of the top floor and read everything until I reached the southwest corner of the basement. Widener Library holds 3.5 million books. Less delusional, but still impractical—considering what a slow reader I am, and how many different subjects are always simultaneously attracting me—when I get interested in a writer, I want to read all their books in the order in which they were written. For example, I would love some day to read Nabokov’s Ada, a favorite of my older daughter, but after reading Lolita, Pale Fire, and Pnin years ago, I became “interested” in Nabokov, which meant I had to start at the beginning. With breaks of months or years between books, during which I’ve continued my glacial progress through other writers’ complete oeuvres, I’ve now read all nine of Nabokov’s Russian novels, but I still have two unread English-language novels between me and Ada. Every now and then my daughter asks me when the hell I’m going to get around to reading this book she’s been urging on me for a decade.
Tag: Chapter: Thursday February 18 2016
A music playlist for The Stone Loves the World
Largehearted Boy is a marvelous site where authors are asked to create a music playlist for their books, accompanied by a paragraph or two explaining the reason for each selection. Links are provided to the relevant recordings. It’s hugely fun to wander around the site, discovering what music has inspired which writer for whatever reason. I provided a list for The Stone Loves the World, and you can access it here.