Reading Projects

Abstract

Reading Projects William Roebuck (bio) Some people collect stamps. Others throw axes or play quidditch. From the Middle English term hobyn, denoting a toy horse and hence an activity done for fun, "hobby" today seems like a pretty inclusive term, although a quick search on Wikipedia, turning up nearly four hundred hobbies, did not include my personal go-to recreational activity, reading projects, perhaps because it sounds about as cutting-edge as a minuet dance club. And unlike a rash of coolly obscure names for practitioners of their hobby, whether old reliables "philatelist" and "lepidopterist"—not to invidiously single out stamp and butterfly collectors—or lesser-known practitioners such as badge-collecting "scutelliphilists," "reading projectologist" just doesn't have a lot of fizz and pop to it. But there it is; to paraphrase a familiar public confessional formula: "My name is Bill, and I'm a reader." When I was a young person growing up in North Carolina, I would try to pass off my love of reading as a hobby. "Why, son, that ain't a hobby," I remember being told. Over the years, despite that cool reaction from various gatekeepers intent on not letting reading stink up the pristine standards of hobbydom, I found myself forging ahead and organizing my reading activity into the somewhat more cataloged, rounded activity I call "reading projects." Sometimes this has meant tackling an author's entire body of work, at least as I defined it, or the major novels or one topical hit, such as Daniel Defoe's powerful A Journal of the Plague Year, read in our year of coronavirus, three hundred years after it was first published. Occasionally it has denoted efforts to educate myself on a particular topic, whether the history of Saudi Arabia or the migration of the blues out of the Mississippi Delta. From time to time, I've gone for a "this and that" pattern, reading a novel recently published in alternation with something more classic and extending the pattern. At one point, for example, in a possibly misbegotten effort to read the major novels of Henry James, works of [End Page 184] increasing density and difficulty from his late-career, pre–World War I years, I spiced things up by reading a novel each by Colson Whitehead, Paul Beatty, and Jennifer Egan—razor-sharp contemporary novelists—in between my Ironman efforts with The Golden Bowl, The Wings of the Dove, and The Ambassadors. In addition to the change of pace, there were some interesting literary ricochets between works: for example, Whitehead's The Underground Railroad and the background that shaped James's early years under the watchful abolitionist eye of his father and James senior's company of famous family friends and John Brown supporters Emerson and Thoreau. Beatty's merciless, satiric wit, on display in The Sellout, with equal measures of Jonathan Swift and Dave Chappelle, provided fierce respite from James's spirited but doomed American heiresses in Europe. And while nothing contemporary quite prepared me for the high-toned rigors (and occasional longueurs) of James's The Ambassadors, I do believe that Jennifer Egan's A Visit from the Goon Squad, with its beautifully interlocking stories, served as a nice chaser—or, more precisely, morning-after hair-of-the-dog concoction—to ward off the reading hangover James had given me. Egan's novel, ranging over forty-plus years in the rock music industry, also managed, with its dizzying multiple perspectives, to half capture, half anticipate the e-podified emotional zeitgeist we inhabit. This brings me to that delicate but unavoidable issue that any reading projectologist faces when they start showing off their collection. Other hobbyists have collected different stamps or polished rocks or postcards—or books read. Does anyone care what this rail fan or that reader has to say about his or her favorite model trains or novels? The answer, surprisingly enough, is that people do, in limited but important ways. I believe readers, with regard to other readers, are willing to suspend resistance or perhaps apathy towards others' reading choices in order to facilitate the ongoing conversations constantly in play among book lovers: "What do I like?" "Why did you...