Should you keep a list of every book you read? by Nilanjana Roy (2017/09/01)

He’s nothing fancy, this Book of Books of mine?.?.?.?he is factory-made, gray and plain, with a charcoal binding and white unlined paper, an inelegant relic from the days before bookstores stocked Moleskine notebooks,” writes Pamela Paul in My Life with Bob. And yet Bob is special, the most charming of inanimate protagonists, “a bound record of everything I’ve read or didn’t quite finish reading since the summer of 1988”.

All bibliophiles are touched by a form of divine madness, but the strain that overtakes readers such as Paul, editor of the New York Times Book Review, is a particularly benign aspect of the condition. She displays true bravery by listing all of the books she’s finished reading, placing an empty square or an “inc.” (for “incomplete”) to mark the few that she abandons. This is a baring of one’s soul that merits respect — especially when she lists not only the modern classics or the children’s books that she loves (“the yellow-bound Nancy Drews”), but also the flirtations with pulp, cheap romances, the dive into self-help literature.I can take consolation from another of the great list-makers, the lady-in-waiting in the Empress Sadako’s court who drew up over 160 lists in The Pillow Book. Sei Shonagon was a sceptic of the diary proper but a genius at keeping entertaining, and sometimes stingingly truthful, records of, among others: “Things That Give a Clean Feeling”, “Things That Irritate Me” (lovers who snore, lovers who bumble about while taking their leave), “Elegant Things” (duck eggs, a rosary of rock crystal, wisteria blossoms). It is quite heroic to list with honesty everything that once appealed to you, without snobbery or discomfort. Even for the most fearless of diarists, much of the shadowed truths of their lives lie in what was not recorded, the moments that slipped through the fishing net of journal entries.Reading Paul, I began to see how much the books you gravitate towards reveal about your truest loves, your most instinctive urges, as well as more thoughtful, curated appetites. Many of her memories tackle the gap between reality and imagination. A trip inspired by Vikram Seth’s From Heaven Lake sends her into a landscape rendered unfamiliar because she arrives at the wrong time of the year, the weather lowering and dark. In China, Jung Chang’s Wild Swans sends her spinning into a brief period of austere abnegation, as she tries to balance her trials — the cold weather, bleeding feet, spurts of hunger — against the sufferings narrated in that classic.Trying to understand the appeal of the simple but revealing list-keeping that Paul embarked on, I rummaged through other ways of mapping the self that might be more useful than keeping a diary. Besides, diary entries had begun to take on the dull shape of duty, and I didn’t like being dutiful. Instead, I jotted down odd notes and observations on index cards, keeping them in an empty tin of Old Delhi delicacies, reading them perhaps once a year. Others have maintained records of the meals they cook or eat, for instance, or keep a running record of films watched.Recently, I discovered the pleasure of not-for-Instagram photography — pictures taken of daily life, or places travelled to, that function as a running journal, not for publication. I envy artists and illustrators, the shining ones whose notebooks are filled with sketches or pen-and-ink doodles. In an age of Facebook and selfies, people don’t even realise that they might be “lying” by curating a flawless (or at least less imperfect) version of their lives. The opposite is also true: we distrust the over-emotional status update, sensing that perhaps the deepest emotions are not so easily paraded on the public stage. Blogs allowed people more room to be human — to be flawed, or low, or slightly off-kilter. Facebook, with its steady stream of holiday posts and shiny happy family photos, encourages a collective humble-bragging (I am not immune). It’s not so much that we’re making our lives up as that we’re selecting the more flattering bits, though I notice that the truly happy among my friends increasingly choose to keep the happiest moments of their lives more or less private.Pamela Paul’s Bob, her book of books read over a lifetime, appeals to me far more than Facebook’s seductions because it seems a more authentic way of revealing — and perhaps even being surprised by — yourself. It’s a measure of the success of this simple but brilliant way of list-making that my first reaction was to think with dismay of the many decades of reading life I’d left unrecorded — and now it’s too late.