AMBITION

I must face it. I cannot possibly read all the books I wish to in my lifetime. There is something a little sad about that--in many ways, I am aware. Nevertheless, I doggedly continue building the reading list. I keep piling the books in my floor and by my bedside. It is almost like a promise to them. I will get to you. I swear. Please do not take it personally. All that said, though, sometimes ambition will overtake me and I will attempt to multitask. You and I have heard plenty by now about the supposed fact that multitasking simply does not work. Our brains, from what we are told by people smarter than I am, are not wired to absolutely focus on more than one thing at a time. Thus, we may think we are paying adequate enough attention to the conversation, the email, the road, when in all actuality one or another of those things is being completely ignored, even if only in bursts of a few seconds.

In spite of the scientific evidence, however, I persist. I will try and read two, perhaps even three, books at a time. Okay, I will tell myself, this is the primary book, to be read during my serious and devoted reading time--before bed. This other one and maybe that one, too, I can carry with me during the day and sneak bits of it down when I have a moment. You know, at lunch, in waiting rooms, while the pasta boils, at red lights. Sometimes it works. Most of the time it does not. One of two things invariably happens. I enjoy both or all of the books immensely and it takes me twice as long to finish them. Or, I key in on my favorite of the bunch and leave the others languishing, giving them not nearly enough of their due, and end up forced to abandon them.

This happened to me recently with a new book that I was genuinely excited about, Ramona Ausubel's No One Is Here Except All of Us. It is a strange book, not quite fantasy, but definitely fantastical in a way that reminds me of Mark Helprin's Winter's Tale. It is about memory and imagination and so many other things and is the story of an isolated Romanian town which decides to begin the world completely anew when they realize what is coming as World War Two and the Holocaust begin to unfold around them. I expected it to be strange in a good way. And, I really did give it an honest effort, lasting through more than one hundred pages. Which brings me to a troubling question. How much reading is sufficient enough to give a book a fair chance? I was ready to give up all hope on this one after about ten pages, but that did not seem nearly enough. Then, of course, every page turned after that became all the more tedious. In the midst of this internal debate I overheard a staff member in our local library talking with another patron. His opinion as a reader is one that I trust and I heard him say in discussing a book he did not enjoy, "Why waste time on a bad book? There are too many good ones to get to." That remark tipped the scale for me and, after one more valiant effort, I closed the cover without marking the page. I did so with a heavy heart, because I have the smallest inkling of the hard work and sweat that go into creating a story. Ausubel's novel is obviously not a bad book. It just did not appeal to me, but I could not help but feel some guilt for not finishing what she must have given so much of herself to.

What is keeping my attention, on the other hand, is the second book of a five-volume biography of my old friend, Ernest Hemingway, by Michael S. Reynolds. It is utterly fascinating. This second book is Hemingway: The Paris Years. With five volumes, Reynolds is exhaustive to say the least. While not a daily chronicle, it comes close. Yet, Reynolds is one of those gifted biographers who can be meticulous while at the same time writing in a way that is as compelling as good fiction. And, it is this particular volume that follows Hemingway through his 20's as he served what amounted to his apprenticeship as a writer, honing his skill and craft on stories and then working through his first novel, The Sun Also Rises, which, of course, changed both the course of his life and the literary world forever. I already have the final two volumes in the stacks. I may be busy for a while.