sipping books and the shame of the unread

I took Lydia Davis’s Essays: Two out of the library. I had purchased both of her previous collections (Stories and Essays: One). But I had read them only piecemeal and purged them during one of my wild bookshelf pillages.  So I thought I would borrow this one.  

The three Lydia Davis collected volumes are beautiful physical objects. Thick bricks, almost square in dimension. Simple design – single background color, white text, white border– yet the colors feel selected with discernment. They are, for some reason, perfect. Lydia Davis has impeccable taste, a type of deep taste from a time before instagram. When aesthetics was plural and had no hashtag. 

They feel good in the hand. The paper is high quality, the books are small but have heft. They want to be flipped through. And the form mirrors content. Lydia Davis stacks words like bricks. Her sentences are small but dense. No one is as aware of what they are doing with words as she is, nor as interested in what words are doing.

Davis’s prose isn’t difficult – one of its virtues is that it’s very, very clear. And I think her pieces don’t need to settle exactly. They are not quite profound, they don’t reveal more and more if you think or re-read. Her writing is an object itself: it doesn’t point to anything. She is a sculptor of sentences, and they are the art. 

So these collections, which look so beautiful on the shelf, are in fact made to be there, so you can reach for one and flip through, reading – sipping– a little bit at a time. You can visit the sentence museum whenever you want.

But I don’t read that way. 

I’m a cover-to-cover person. I thrive on momentum. I read everything, but novels are where I’m most at home. I love books where you get to the end and the whole thing re-forms in your mind, becomes an object, makes sense of itself. 

I love essays but I don’t always finish essay collections because you don’t get that final hit. Collections use the form of the book because of its convenience: a book is a good place for, well, collecting essays (for example). 

The essential element of the collection is the items in it, not the collection itself. And so it’s designed for sipping, for the shelf. It can be read any way you want. Is that why I always think I’m doing it wrong? Too much choice? 

Why is there so much shame in the reading life? (Why do I feel so much shame in my reading life?) I love reading. My vast and idiosyncratic literary diet gives me great pleasure. As long as I don’t think about it. Because I always think I’m doing something wrong.  I buy too many books. And then there they are, taunting me from every surface of my house. 

What might look to an outsider like evidence of an interesting mind – all kinds of novels, music writing, psychology, books about dogs, books about science, poetry, etc etc ad nauseum – feels to me like derangement. 

And also lies: these books are filled with things I want to know, stories I want to read. They are the things I aspire to, not the things I am. Many, many of these books are unread. I am no reader, I am a dilettante and a shopaholic.

The thing is, I like sipping books. Not all the time, but as a treat. They have their place – many places, actually. Poetry and some essays are generative – I read a little, and then I magically start writing. Reference books are, you know, for reference, and it’s bizarre that I feel guilty for not reading various guides to English usage cover to cover, or whatever. The oddities, like The Anatomy of Melancholy, well isn’t it nice just to have it there? What would make me think “read” and “unread” was a binary? I mean, I don't think anything else is.

What if a bookshelf is an item of furniture used for storing books, not a constant reminder of the inadequacy of my mind and soul? What if it’s just … a collection?