My mother gave me an ancient treasure today that she had found in her records.
It's a well-thumbed blue Hilroy Exercise Book, a No. 993 Narrow Ruled, with a price of 39 cents printed on it.
It contains a list of 1,446 books that I read between August 1971 and July 1, 1985. That's an average of 103 books a year!
There is also a series of notations and calculations on the last page that says by a "conservative estimate" I had read 1,250 books up to August 1971, for a total of 2,696 books by age 26.
Zounds! Needless to say, the yearly totals dwindled fairly rapidly until for several years I was reading barely a book a month. In the last couple of years I've been back up to several books a month, but I doubt if I'll ever return to the voracious pace of my youth.
I still keep records of books I've read, and after a six-month gap in the last half of 1985 (when I was on the road in Japan and Southeast Asia -- surely I must have some record somewhere?), the count picks up again in 1986.
From 1986 through the end of 2004, I read 819 books, for a life total to that date of 3,515 books.
Flipping through that dog-eared Hilroy stirs fond memories of binges of reading on photography, cars, art, nature, music, economics, history, psychology, Canadiana, etc. The phases I went through, the one or two-month flares of passion for some subject that I can barely recall now.
A summer in my teens spent in a cast, plowing through Solzhenitsyn novel after Solzhenitsyn novel. I read thousands of pages of Solzhenitsyn in a month or two, the Gulag series and most of his novels -- I guess I was quite ill :-).
It's a fascinating record, and a somewhat scary one too, when I think of how few of all those words I can recall. I guess it all adds up though -- while I may not remember specifics, the knowledge and the styles are still guiding me today.
Thanks for preserving that blue notebook, Mom!
Posted by Paul at July 9, 2005 07:33 PM