Be More Careful About My Reading Lists
Maria Bustillos has this fabulous thing in the New Yorker about how many books we should be reading and in what manner and why.
A difficult novel, let’s say, “The Brothers Karamazov,” will take most readers a matter of weeks to “read, mark, learn, and inwardly digest” (as “The Book of Common Prayer” has it). You can go faster if you just want to be told a story. You can also go faster if you already know a lot about nineteenth-century Russia. But curiosity might easily lead the ordinary reader to look into all kinds of subjects related to the novel — to search out a photograph or a painting of a Russian Orthodox monastery — or to learn something more about the aspects of Christianity (redemption, sin, expiation) that are addressed in the book. These things take time.
She is also COMPLETELY CORRECT about John Waters. I have bought every book that John Waters has referenced or recommended, however obliquely, and he’s never steered me wrong. Not to mention Waters’ great aphorism: “If you go home with somebody, and they don’t have books, don’t fuck ‘em!” He’s an American hero.