What did I read this year? Well, I read my e-mail, I read the backs of cereal boxes, I read the ads on the subway; I read the New York Times quite a lot (though still not enough to feel that I was staying abreast of world affairs); I read a number of literary periodicals (each one stuffed with reviews of books that I will never read); and I read the jacket copy of countless books during my many hours of browsing. I like browsing for books; I like the sense of endless possibility, the promise of freedom, of new life that seems so close at hand. There’s also something sad about browsing, though—a tugging awareness that what you’re doing is a waste of time, that your work is still all ahead of you. It always makes me think of the opening of Larkin’s poem “To My Wife”:
Choice of you shuts up that peacock-fan
The future was, in which temptingly spread
All that elaborative nature can.
Matchless potential! but unlimited
Only so long as I elected nothing…
Giles Harvey, The Year in Not Reading: Peter Nadas, The Book Bench
