I know what you mean about lists getting longer and longer, the impossibility, short of immortality, of ever reading everything on them.

So what sorts of books do you find yourself (re)reading?

I like how Nabokov, in the quote that John posted below, inserts the act of reading into a temporal process but, on second thought, I’m a bit uncomfortable how he wants to skip so quickly over the process of the eye engaging the page to the mind appreciating the text. I was thinking of something Donald Davie said about Pound’s Cantos:

“Indeed, ‘reading’ is an unsatisfactory word for what the eye does as it resentfully labors over and among these blocks of dusty historical debris.”

Davie is obviously being derogatory here but one thing that I like about Pound’s poem is the heterogenous texture of the surface– the way Pound re-conceptualizes the initial act of reading as something more than just “moving our eyes from left to right”– it requires a much more “complicated physical work upon the book” (to use N.’s phrase again) and no doubt many will be resentful about this process…

Some more Whitman (from Democratic Vistas):

“…the process of reading is not a half sleep, but, in the highest sense, an exercise, a gymnast’s struggle; that the reader is to do something for himself, must be on the alert, must himself or herself construct indeed the poem.”