I thought of you when I read this piece in Australian Higher Ed, Wed. 5/12/07

reading

The author queries doom and gloom assessments of the falling numbers of people who read books. He refers specifically to the world of reading done over the internet, including through access to blogs.

When I was young like you are and in a library, I worked my way through the stacks library shelves from A to B. I remember reading Saul Bellow, Isaac Bashevis Singer ( I think in B) and Martin and other sundry Boyds. I cannot remember the A s, in fact they may have been boring and I moved to the B s. I then discovered WW1 books and read my way through the classics from Siegfried Sassoon and Robert Graves’ “Goodbye to all that ” to studies of battles – the Somme., etc. Then I discovered Russian books and read Sholokov, Tolstoy, Solzhenitsyn, Dostovyesky. Then there was John Updike and the “Rabbit “books, Philip Roth and Sinclair Lewis, Doris Lessing. Periodically, I gave the classics away for new classics – the spy novels of Le Carre and Deighton.

I have never had a wish list or books to read before I die. So many great books are published daily and favourite authors are waited for and new favourites are discovered, more often than not, serendipitously. Book lovers meet other book lovers all the time and the instant you chat to a fellow traveller who thinks like you do and who reads, your pathway becomes littered with new books to read and every book you choose will be perfect for you at the time. Indeed later on in those distant 40 years from now, you may be surprised at how little of your list you have read.

I find that book reviews are as stimulating to read as books and I can become addicted to them.
Eventually I learnt to mark out which books I would definitely read and I chased them down. To let chance take you to books may be the best option: if you calculate 40 years and 10 or 15 books a year, which is fast and constant reading, you still would struggle to get through your 700 books on your list now. And, no account can be taken of books you put on your list today and tomorrow and next week and month and…