Writing, reading, and time

I spend too little time reading.

Every night, I manage to read at least a few pages before I fall asleep, usually of a novel, rarely of some general nonfiction (The Botany of Desire most recently). But that's not the place or way to read the books and articles that are being written in my field (with rare exceptions, and those are usually actually outside the discipline: Judith Butler's Psychic Life of Power was bedtime reading...).

For those, I need to be upright, sitting at a desk or in a chair. I read a fair amount of professional literature prepping for classes. If I banish novels from my carry-on, I can read books in my field on airplanes. But more of what I read is simultaneous with writing.

Because in preference to reading something someone else in my field has written, I like to write. I think I write too much; although I also am always painfully aware of what I haven't written, or haven't finished writing.

I feel guilty about what I haven't written, but oddly, I don't feel guilty about what I am not reading. I used to, so this is something that has changed over time. I used to feel a tyranny of the need to read everything by everyone else. But as my interests kept broadening, my ability to read "everything" receded into the distance.

So now I read in motivated ways. When I write, I gather together towers of books, and folders of PDFs of articles, and chains of Google Books links. I like the excuse writing gives me to use article databases and do open-ended searches, to find things I would otherwise never have known existed.

And even though I think of my reading habits as having changed utterly since graduate school days, I recognize these computer-aided searches as the descendants of the way I worked throughout my dissertation writing phase. At Illinois, we could have a locked carrel in the stacks, and I would go there and make neat 3 x 5 cards of notes (all of which I still have) of books I hunted down on my own. Walking to the place on the shelf that was my selected destination, I would read the titles along the way. Of course, this was nowhere near as complete a search as I can do today: for one thing, it tended to be limited to the shelves at my eye-level, just above and just below. But I found things that I would never have in the deliberate way.

So I read a lot, then. And I probably read a lot, now. But I feel like there is some scholarly standard that I am failing to achieve. Nonetheless, any time I read those texts that either are submitted for review or somehow make it into print larded with citations, I hate them. I want your ideas, not a rehash of those of anyone else. And the one thing I can guarantee is that my writing presents my own ideas.

I have stopped agreeing to review papers and manuscripts-- it takes away my own time to write, which means my own time to read. I used to take inordinate time and write long, detailed, thoughtful reviews. At one juncture, my old doctoral advisor told me an editor of a major journal had described me as his "ideal reviewer" and said my reviews would be publishable papers. I was cured of this by the author of the worst book ever written on Honduran archaeology: I kept receiving it, unchanged, from different presses even though I had tried to suggest ways to bring it up to barely publishable status. So I realized that I was wasting my time and decided to stop.

(Nor was my opinion of this wretched book unique; here's what another colleague said in a review on Amazon.com-- a signed review:

Riddled with errors, this gives a highly distorted view of the region. Relies heavily on secondary sources. How in heaven's name does the author dare to claim that "Jorge de Olancho" was the name of a conquistador? Shoddy scholarship abounds in this disappointing work.

Ouch.)

So, I will go back to my office surrounded by books, writing a few pages and then seeking the parts that I know from teaching are buried in the specifics of the author's case study. I will browse my way through article databases in search of the serendipity of a new author, new journal, new interdisciplinary dialogue.

But I read too little. And write too much. Except that I am not writing what I should write. And I will still wake up in the middle of the night thinking that and despairing of ever satisfying that internal critic.