I appreciate the post at The Valve today. It’s about reading lists and lack of time. All of us avid readers can relate. We have careers, school, friends, family, hobbies, and all of the things to do that make life life. In my case, whenever I’m doing those other things, I’m still thinking about reading and writing.

But I don’t compile reading lists like I used to. Now I just write down a book title here or there or check it out of the library and keep renewing it until I can find the time to read it. But I still make lists. They’re “books I’ve already read” lists, which are real and definite. There are lots of unread books on my bookshelves, but I don’t worry about those. All of the ones I haven’t read, I had a chance to read but chose not to (for all kinds of reasons). When I’m ready, it’ll be read. I picked up Faulkner when I was 16, and put him right back down. I simply wasn’t ready (now he’s one of my favorite authors).

I don’t have regrets about the reading choices I made as a teenager. I read a few teen romance books lent to me by a friend, and then I stopped borrowing them. After 1984, Animal Farm, Anthem, etc., there was no going back. Then I got ahold of some “must read but usually not read classics” list in my mid teens. I didn’t read even close to all of them (distractions), but I do recall reading Dostoevsky’s The Idiot and Pascal’s Pensees. And sometime during those blury teen years, I read Till We Have Faces by C. S. Lewis (horror of horrors, possibly), a retelling of the myth of Cupid and Psyche, still one of my favorite books.

I make lists of “already read” books for two reasons:

- They’re not paralyzing like a “to read” list can be.

- Otherwise, I forget.

Of the thousands of books that I read as a teenager and even in much more recent years, I can only recall a handfull. It’s so sad.