a book is an idea is time spent reading it

i was walking in a bookstore the other day, and they had this entire table of discounted books. a passing glance told me i had never heard of any of the authors, nor titles there. and then this feeling of ignorance, and perhaps also smallness washed over me. i privately consoled myself by making my brain believe that those were small-time authors, and we are living in an increasingly self-published world where small-time authors abound.

sadly, i must admit to not having great literary tastes. there are books i read for the purpose of research, and for a good while, they become indispensable - such that i feel those authors/academics have become my favourite ones to read. and inescapably, there are philosophers whose ideas come into vogue and then ebb (19th century french ones, for instance), and "evergreen" philosophers that anyone can quote, sometimes, even out of context. like nietzsche.

while i try to desensitise myself to name-dropping in conversations, it is frequently close to impossible for academics to have a coherent conversation sometimes without them referring casually to this theory, or that concept. it gets hard to keep up. every week i tell myself i have to be up to scratch with readings, but new ones come along and the backlog only gets bigger.

there is a distinction to be made between reading for work and for pleasure. some may say dismissively that 'oh! my work is my interest' with a casual flick of their hand. but how can someone immerse themselves in a particular field all the time? surely, there has to be a division of work interests and other-time interests? of the few authors of fiction i'm proud to like, are neil gaiman, and though past the quarter-century mark, jk rowling. and then some. more, i mean. :)

by now harry potter fans have probably heard that she says in book 7 "two die that I didn’t intend to die". shouldn't surprise me as much as it did, really.

but i digress. a writing workshop i attended some nights ago gave me a strange impetus to look up gertrude stein. and i did, today, and now she's going to be the author for the week. the flavour of the month, more like. sometimes i feel obliged to read stuff that supervisors or other lecturers casually name-drop. i haven't read widely enough for an informed backbone of my own, and that's really coming back to bite me in the ass.

i just wish authors weren't so prolific sometimes. give some of us slow and fickle readers a chance to catch up.

and then again, i am reminded of the mayor of casterbridge i'd left half-read maybe 8 years ago, and bluffed my way through a book review back then. i was a thomas hardy fan when i read far from the madding crowd but not his later novels. odd, really.

sometimes i ask myself: why is everyone else so fond of a particular classic but i can't wrap my head around it?