Lent: T minus 7; Pitchers and Catchers: T minus 14

I’m still putting thought into what I should do for Lent this year. The New Yorker ran an interesting piece on Art Garfunkel and the list of books he has read:

Candidates for political office, and the reporters who cover them, like to believe that a reading list reveals a great deal. In recent years, the cherished-book list has become as compulsory a component of the Presidential campaign as a church affiliation or a health-care plan. Hillary Clinton named “Little Women” and “The Poisonwood Bible.” Mike Huckabee: the Bible and “Mere Christianity.” Barack Obama: “Song of Solomon” and “Moby-Dick.” John McCain: “For Whom the Bell Tolls.” When mishandled, the book thing can lead to grief, as when Mitt Romney cited “Battlefield Earth,” by L. Ron Hubbard, or when John Edwards, four years ago, went with I. F. Stone’s “The Trial of Socrates,” which earned him the skunk eye from Robert Novak. (“Did [Edwards] know of evidence that Stone received secret payments from the Kremlin?”)

Then there is Art Garfunkel, who is not running for President but who has nonetheless provided the world with a list: the Garfunkel Library, a chronological index of the thousand and twenty-three books that he has read since June, 1968.

– from The King of Reading, by Nick Paumgarten

It’s interesting to see what another person is reading. You can tell a lot about a person by what he/she reads. It’s kind of like the Dinner Guest Question. Or the Athlete You’d Most Like To Meet Question. When Dan Patrick asked Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue model Brooklyn Decker (25 December 2008 show, re-aired on New Years Day) which athlete she’d most like to meet I expected her to say Tom Brady or some other pretty boy type — a conventional answer I’d expect from just about any young woman asked about sports. But nope, Decker — a dedicated Carolina fan — said Michael Jordan. Mad props to her for that.

I love reading but have got to be the slowest reader on the planet. I also don’t put aside enough time to read, squeezing in maybe 30-45 minutes a night right before bedtime. The fate of reading was discussed in another New Yorker article:

There’s no reason to think that reading and writing are about to become extinct, but some sociologists speculate that reading books for pleasure will one day be the province of a special “reading class,” much as it was before the arrival of mass literacy, in the second half of the nineteenth century. They warn that it probably won’t regain the prestige of exclusivity; it may just become “an increasingly arcane hobby.” Such a shift would change the texture of society. If one person decides to watch “The Sopranos” rather than to read Leonardo Sciascia’s novella “To Each His Own,” the culture goes on largely as before—both viewer and reader are entertaining themselves while learning something about the Mafia in the bargain. But if, over time, many people choose television over books, then a nation’s conversation with itself is likely to change. A reader learns about the world and imagines it differently from the way a viewer does; according to some experimental psychologists, a reader and a viewer even think differently. If the eclipse of reading continues, the alteration is likely to matter in ways that aren’t foreseeable.

– from Twilight of the Books, by Caleb Crain

When I lived in NYC and had those long commutes to work I read a lot of short stories. (I bought a copy of Italo Calvino’s “Difficult Loves” because I liked the title; he’s become one of my favorite authors of all-time and I’ve read almost all his works.) It was a great way to pass the time, but after a while I felt that in reading short stories my attention span was shrinking. So I switched to reading novels. I think I’m in the same boat now, reading a lot of short pieces — newspapers and blogs via this computer, hard copies of a few magazine and the local paper. Not bad stuff, but not much in the 100-200+ page range to really engage my focus. I only read three or four books last year. I honestly feel that my attention span isn’t what it used to be.

Hence another bright idea for Lent: read a book. I’d like to get into the habit of reading something long and involved, maybe 20 pages a night. To some, 20 pages is nothing, but to me that’s a lot.

I used to read books a lot more than I do now and have left only a few unfinished:

• Moles Pity — I never could get into it
• Henderson the Rain King — I liked it but started a new job when I was about 100 pages into it, put it down and never picked it back up
• The Magic Mountain — My Sisyphean boulder. I tried reading it five or six summers in a row and never got more than 150 pages into it. Maybe my attention span was already slipping back then. I can’t even remember why I picked it up in the first place. The story is interesting. Hans Castorp is on a train going up a mountain to (I think) visit his cousin who is in a sanitarium. That’s all I recall from the first 100 or so pages of the book.

Maybe I’ll give “The Magic Mountain” another try. It’s a fat book. I have a paperback copy that is about two inches thick. 500 pages, at least. It would certainly keep me busy during Lent.

Hans Castorp’s trip up the mountain makes me think about the upcoming baseball season. Rick Peterson, Mets’ pitching coach and font of metaphors, said “A full season is like crossing an ocean.” Last year was not a good one for us. Not only did we not make it to the top of the mountain, we fell off a cliff and the ship sank as well. I hope we do better this year.