Emily keeler
‘ You didn’t read the books you carry inside you because some newspaper columnist implored you to pick them up’
The books that stick with you are the ones that find you and fix you
Anew year brings with it the opportunity to make new commitments, to promise yourself that you’ll be better, smarter, healthier, simultaneously more informed and relaxed as you flip through the pages of another new calendar. Nearly half of us make resolutions, but few will quit smoking, lose weight, read more books, or floss all the way through to the dawn of 2017.
One needs a resolution only when one has a problem; you resolve to fix something broken in your life. The only resolution I’ve ever kept was to read 50 books in a specific year. Five years ago I worked in a quiet office where my main duty was simply to sit in the chair in case anyone called or showed up. My time was bought for just a hair more than minimum wage, but my mind was completely unaccounted for. I would go home, tired from doing so much nothing, put on some rice and turn on the television. As the holidays approached, I looked up and realized I was missing something. Some part of my life had stopped working, and I had to fix it.
The thing I was missing may not have been reading, but the books I read that year did more than patch the hole; I kept a public reading diary of my response to the things I was putting in my head, and I met other people with similar projects. Gradually, the shape of my life changed — I had fixed problems I didn’t even fully know I’d had.
In an interview I did around that time with Sheila Heti, as her novel How Should a Person Be was ramping up stateside, she told me that “writing about anything is like a way of fixing something about your life.” Reading, I think, serves a similar function. Looking back at my life, I find the books I loved best were the ones that I read under the circumstance of kismet; Timothy Findley’s Pilgrim, the story of an ageless, genderless immortal undergoing Jungian analysis meant so much because it came into my life as a troubled teen, unsure what to make of all the doors that had yet to open for me; W. Somerset Maugham’s Cakes and Ale, a nearly perfect coming of age novel, was a guide model for learning to tolerate adolescent uncertainty in the face of the dawning knowledge that even adults hardly know what they’re doing; Gary Shteyngart’s Super Sad True Love Story at the height of the Occupy Movement’s spot in the news cycle, making light out of the dark situation and the circumstances that led us to it. The books that you carry inside you like your own troubled thoughts are never the ones that you read because some newspaper columnist implored you to pick them up, they’re the ones that find you and fix you, resolve the problems you didn’t quite know you had.
At this time of year, many of us will be resolving to read more through 2016, and it’s a noble goal, even if we’re all but destined to fail. Resolve instead to open yourself up to the kind of book you didn’t know you needed: this past year, it wasn’t until the final week of December that the right book found me — The Triumph of Narrative, Robert Fulford’s 1999 Massey lecture. With his observations on the power and necessity of story, of the making and unmaking of true and not-so-true beginnings, middles, and ends, I met anew with that old certain knowledge: it’s never not a good time to fix your life.