A Light in the Darkness of Knowledge.

(11) Reentry by assault.  The writer-artist makes sure that he is in the world and that he is really by taking on the world, usually by political action and, more often than not, revolutionary.  Even if one is imprisoned by the state—especially if one is imprisoned—one can be certain of being human.  Ghosts can’t be imprisoned.  This stratagem is more available to European writers, who are taken more seriously than American writers.  The secret envy of American writers: Alexander Solzhenitsyn.  Despite their most violent attacks on the state and the establishment, nobody pays much attention to American writers, least of all the state.  To have taken on the state and defeated it, like Solzhenitsyn, is beyond the wildest dreams of the American writer.  Because the state doesn’t care.  This indifference leads to ever more frantic attempts to attract attention, like an ignored child, even to the point of depicting President Johnson and Lady Bird plotting the assassination of Kennedy with Barbara Garson’s MacBird!, or President Nixon having sex with Ethel Rosenberg and being buggered by Uncle Sam in Times Square in Robert Coover’s The Public Burning.

Still, no one pays attention.

A paradigm of this generally failed reentry option: a lonely “radical” American writer standing outside the White House gate, screaming obscenities about this fascist state, dictatorship, exploitation of minorities, suppression of freedom of speech, and so on and on—all the while being ignored by President, police, and passerby.

There are worse thing than the Gulag.

–Walker Percy, Lost in the Cosmos, page 158.

A friend and I were talking about how our reading habits have suffered in the last year.  She got married has a baby, a toddler and a small business they just started to boot.  I’m not sure what my excuse is but I am sure it rather lame compared what hers is.

I have only been reading about one book a week for the last few months.  I have been keeping a list so I will know what a more long term average is.  I write the title, author, number of pages and the date I finished it on down in a small acid free journal I got from a large faceless book broker at a fair price.

She has knocked it up a notch and is attempting to read 200 classic books in a year.  Both of us could have easily completed the target goal before “life” happened.  But with all the obligations of our daily lives we both find it harder to soar into the large “Have read this year” reading lists we used to keep.  Now it is mostly squeaking by.  Squeaking by for us, as according to a recent study I read, only 1 out of 3 Americans will ever finish reading a book after they graduate from college.  Scary stuff.

Go check out her blog at 200 Books.  She plans on updating it daily.