I feel constantly guilty about things I think I should have read
but haven't, worst about people of note of whom I've read nothing,
or those I've found valuable in the past of whom I've not read
more. I have stopped buying books I know I won't have time to
read, but used to do that a lot.
I resonate with your description of the grace of the gods of
serendipity! how is it that when we have an issue in mind,
a specific or even still-inchoate and inarticulate quandary,
that what comes to hand from the shelf so often seems written
just for our purpose? What a miracle of appropriate we perform
in these cases! Is it so different from opening the Bible at
random in times of need? do we need only some perspective not
our own to catalyze the avalanche of ideas coming together?
I have seriously proposed to designers of information retrieval
systems that they allow users to set a general level of
random retrieval (1%, 10%) to accompany specific requests.
I learned the value of this from the not-quite-random practice
of browsing the stacks of a great library en route to the
shelves where my designated topic or book was located -- talk
about emergent goals!!
My current professional reading tends to be very focussed,
usually on a person or a theme. The themes are related to my
work, the persons chosen by word-of-mouth or citations and a
general sense that some people are worth reading whatever
they are talking about. I just picked up a book by Niklas
Luhmann (finally!) on the semantics and social history of
'love' relations and discourse -- because somebody had beat
me to two other books of his, and we don't have his major
theoretical treatise at our campus branch library; it's
elsewhere in the university's distributed system.
I only have time to read a few things a year -- alas. I try
to make sure they are MAJOR in terms of ideas or viewpoints,
and I will set something aside if I don't sense that level
of insight. Fortunately this elitist strategy is buttressed
by serendipity and necessity. I get my clues for what to read
from others' citations and recommendations, including those
here on xmca.
When I decide I am reading something I want to assimilate,
use, and cite, especially major theorists, I make marginal
notes in the text and then elaborate these, both summarizing
the text and commenting on it to myself, in notes in a computer
file written more or less contemporaneously with my reading,
usually chapter by chapter, or section by section in a long
article. I return often to these notes.
I am a writer by temperament (as you see), and I read in
a writerly way. JAY.
JAY LEMKE.
City University of New York.
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