What's the gist of your literary list?

"I like to see my fish* on my plate, not in my book." (Anonymous)
*whale is not fish, while tomato is fruit -strange world we live in, ain't it?

I oficially revive my blog with an entry about something I read in the New York Times. Now I start my sentences like my bestest friend, but imitation being the best form of flattery, yada, yada, she shouldn't mind too much. That 'something I read about' is "1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die," by Peter Boxall, a lit prof at Sussex University.

Isn't the concept of the book a bit ageist? And what's this obsession with numbers? What if you are too old to start plodding through the list? It's been calculated that by reading one book a month, you'd finish in 2063. I'll be in my 90's then, if already not grazing sweet grasses of eternal pastures. And, what if you happen to be a slow reader? I prefer careful reader, by the way...
Life is too short to read what other people think is good. Read what you want and when you want, not what is 'in', or when it's in, or what's on various bestseller lists. Whose book taste should you trust anyway?

I have a book that proclaims to be "a collection of world's 50 Best Short Stories ever written." Best, my derriere. While some of them are great, others are merely mediocre, and some plain bad. Lucky, they are short, and I can, if I want to, read them all before 2063. Even the bad ones.

Anthologies, collections and lists that claim to compile 'the bests' are to be taken with a grain of salt. I say this lightly, but I don't follow my own advice. It's pure peer pressure. I always feel that if a book contains the best of the best and the most famous of the famous, everyone must have read the stuff. Do I want to be the only ignorant one who hasn't? Of course not. I go to parties, too, and I also need to talk intelligently and name-drop an author or two, so I keep buying the darn collections, admittedly mostly if they are second- hand and cheap. I don't necessarily read everything that's inside, busy perhaps reading something I enjoy more, or maybe watching "Bianca's TV" - youtube and yahoo videos. No smirking please: they can be very educational.

Recently, I bought two bottles of wine, one red, one white, $3.00 each. They were every drop as awful as I had expected them to be. As a matter of fact, a much fairer deal would have been for the store to offer customers $3.00 to take the bottles away. But, $3 is not a lot of money, no big loss there. And, late night experimenting with spices, fruit and juice turned the vinegary wine into wonderful sangrias ( a photo blog entry about that will follow soon, btw). I treat my bad anthologies like my bad wine: I put them to other usages: as subtitutes for sleeping pills or dusty dinner guests 'impressors" who dutifully 'oh' and 'ah' over my high-brow literary taste. Their greatest use is, however, as an impromtu filing system. I stick in their pages loose receipts and scraps significant enough not to be thrown away but at the same time not significant enough to classify and file properly. Every once in a while, I open my cheap collections of sometimes cheap literature, especially when I am trying to locate a business card that suddenly proves itself important but didn't seem so at the time of casual 'filing.' An added bonus on such occasions is starting to read at random page and finding an unxpected gem.

Reading is a very personal thing, and reading tastes are as varied as fish in the sea. Ultimately, reading should not be about the number of books you read. It's about what you learn from them and how much you enjoy the reading process and appreciate "the artful arrangement of words," which is what Amy Tan calls literature.

A reader of the same article in the NYT posted a comment that says it all. I can't say it better, so I hope that he'll be flattered by my pasting it below and opt out of suing me for plagiarism:

"Lists like this remind me of Dubya's bet that he could read more books over the summer than Condoleeza Rice. He won, I think, but I wonder if he actually learned anything. We are too obsessed with numbers---How many miles do we run a day? How many times a week do we make love? What is our heart rate when we're doing it? I always thought the purpose of reading was to get off the treadmill, to take time out and reflect. You can't do that if you're racing the clock...I shall probably never get to any of the books discussed in this article, and I don't feel any the poorer. And there are many books that have enriched my life --- that will never appear on any list but my own." Beeeeyoootifully put!

I would have thought this guy my reading soulmate except that he owned to spending an entire summer reading Moby Dick only, savouring every word. I, on the other hand, spent 10 miserable Canadian winter days back in 1997 reading it, and then few more agonizing days writing a paper about it. Still, for all my efforts (well, efforts they were!), the most I remember about my Moby Dick experience is the exquisite scent of the two perfect snow white candles made from the fat of an unfortunate Nuntuckett sperm whale that our prof had brought to the class (the candles, not the whale). Oh, and an inexplicable crush I had on him (the whale, not the prof).

The three most recently read books that would definitely make it to my list - were I ever to make such a list - are Jumpa Lahiri's "Namesake," Zadie Smith's "White Teeth" and Dai Sijie's "Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress." I am looking forward to reading Lahiri's collection of short stories "Unaccustomed Earth."