The dangers of being a reader
In which I wonder whether I'm actually at risk of being crushed to death by my books
This is a repost of the first ever issue of A Little Detour, published on February 22, 2024. I’ve been thinking about this essay a lot as my pile of books I need to read has somehow gotten even larger in the last year.
I’m resending it because it’s an old favorite and I suspect many of you here now never got a chance to read it the first time. (If you actually read through all the archives, you get a prize of some kind!)
My friend Ella recommended a book to me the other day. We have similar taste in books or rather we know each other’s taste well enough to note when our Venn diagrams overlap. The book was North Woods by Daniel Mason. The cover has a delightfully weird image. The book notes that the author is a Pulitzer Prize finalist which, for me, is more of a neutral detail than something likely to make me read or not read a book. “You have to read it,” she said. “Such good animal and plant life narrative interspersed.” Honestly all I want to read right now are books with that descriptor and books about women doing things.
It looked perfect. But so do all the other books I wanted to read. Currently I have eleven books out from the library. I have two weeks to get a copy of The Bell Jar and reread it before my book club. “Ella, I am being crushed to death under the weight of books I want to read,” I wrote her. This was, at least emotionally, true.
“What if I run away to a cave and read until I get through all the books I own that I never finish?” I told my friend Ryan.
He laughed. He’d spent a few months living off grid in the desert and said that he could probably make that happen for me. “I’m good at that kind of thing,” he said. I didn’t investigate whether he was joking or not.
“The other thing that’s great about a cave is that I can’t get more books when I’m there,” I said. “So maybe there would be hope.”
Part of the problem is that reading one book just begat more books I wanted to read. When I got to the end of nonfiction books, I scanned the bibliography to look for other titles I hadn’t heard of. Other times, I read one book by an author, fell in love, and wanted to read everything else they’d written. On occasion simply telling my friends about one book I’d finished prompted recommendation for other books that were similar. I suspected that even if I could read faster, I would just wind up with even more books I wanted to read. It was an exponential issue.
After more thought, the conclusion I came to was that the only way to not have so many books on my list needing to be read would be to simply read fewer books. I thought about all the people who get by reading one or ten books a year. That was an untenable solution—for professional and mental health reasons. I simply feel better when I’m regularly reading books.
I’d joked about it with Ella, but one way people tortured and interrogated women suspected of being witches was to slowly crush them under increasing weights laid on top of their bodies. Often this led to death by compression, whether this was on purpose or accidental. One study found that death in these cases was caused by victims’ ribs breaking or fracturing in such a way that made it impossible for people to breathe even if the weight was removed.
I wondered if I was in any danger of being crushed if someone put all the books I owned and had not read on top of me. I glanced at them on the shelves and in piles on the floor around my apartment. It seemed reasonably safe yet though not comfortable. I looked up how much weight it would take to crush a human. One estimate gave 570 pounds as a fatal amount of weight on an adult man. I’d guess I should keep it under 500 pounds to be safe. The average hardcover book is between one and three pounds. A paperback is anywhere from a half to one pound. So as long as I kept the books I owned and hadn’t read under 250, I’d probably be safe. I prefer to own my books in hardcover.
That’s a relief at least. I have a lot of books I want to read in my apartment but not quite that many lying around unread—yet.
Notes:
In re-publishing this essay I also got to revisit the notes I wrote over a year ago.
The paperback of Under the Henfluence had just come out and I described being “hard at work on what I hope will be book number two if I can finish it.” That draft—and two revisions—are now done.
Last week, I sent out query letters to agents—my wonderful, longtime agent recently left the business—looking for someone who might want to represent a spicy modern day retelling of the feminist classic The Awakening as well as my future nonfiction projects. I’ve gotten one request for a full already! But every time I get an email notification my heart jumps into my throat just in case it’s good—or bad—news. (Agents who want to know more, email me!)
I wanted to mention a couple articles worth your time. One was this fantastic feature by Steven Bedard in Biographic about searching for more information about the ghost orchid (made famous to me by Susan Orlean’s The Orchid Thief and the movie somewhat about her book, Adaptation).
Also worth checking out: this Washington Post story by Laney Pope about an amateur herpetologist who let himself get bitten by venomous snakes over 200 times for science.
I’ll be back with a shiny new essay for you all next week.
You can directly support my work by upgrading to a paid subscription to A Little Detour, sharing this post with someone who might enjoy it, or buying a copy of my book Under the Henfluence.
Because all writers have a never-ending hope of finding ways to make writing financially sustainable, I’ve opened a Bookshop.org affiliate page. If you buy any of the books I mention in this newsletter, (hopefully you have more time to read or fewer books you’re already entangled with and won’t be crushed by them) I will get a small commission and will use it to buy myself more books. Oops.