Things That I Will Keep...

...the things that keep me.

I am obsessed with my media collection. My books, my albums (CD's), my DVD's, I spend a lot of time grooming them and looking them over. At times, I think, I am more interested in the maintenance of the collection rathen than its actual content (read: intrinsic artistic value). In my old place, the barcalounger was right next to the shelf unit (IKEA, natch) that housed my CD's. Whenever I would get bored with what happened to be on the television, my eyes would wander over to my albums and I would look them up and down and make sure they were still ordered according to my particular, albeit unoriginal, filing system [genre (broadly defined) --> alphabetical by artist --> chronological by album --> remasters get filed next to their original release]. And among them are always the releases that were purchased for the sole purpose of properly filling out the collection (like Almost Blue even though I rarely listen to any Costello release post-Get Happy!!) which is a good illustration of how my collection has started to take on a life of its own.

But with books I am even worse. I would have to say that there is a 50/50 split between books I've wanted to read and books I thought I should read. Por ejemplo, right now I am reading One Hundred Years of Solitude. One Hundred Fucking Years of Solitude. There is no chance in hell I would have ever picked up this book in the store, read the back cover, thumbed through a few pages, and said "Oh, I gotta read this." But because it is considered a modern masterpiece or whatever I figured I had to read it. And more importantly, I knew it would look good on my bookshelf if I ever had any company over looking through it. Because that's what I do. You can tell so much about a person by digging through his or her books and CD's. If I'm dating someone new, I go straight to her media collection the first time I visit her place. (I generally assume that most people aren't as pretensiously cynical as me and therefore have mostly genuine entries in their respective music and literary collections.) So who knows, maybe the next time some young lady is perusing my bookshelf, it will be Sr. Marquez and One Hundred Years of Solitude that helps me seal the deal. It could happen:

"You've got so many great books."
[whispers]"The better to seduce you with."
"What?"
"Uh, all the better to deduce the truth with."
-- The Tao of Steve

Much to my surprise and satisfaction, I am actually enjoying the book. It's extremely engrossing and I burned through almost half of it on my trip home from San Antonio. The last time I did something like this it did not work out nearly as well. I got on this kick where it seemed absolutely necessary that I read Moby Dick. There were two main reasons. One, because the Literary Establishment deems it an ultimate example of American Literature, whatever that means. And two because at the end of Star Trek II, Khan paraphrases Ahab while screaming to a Kirk that cannot hear him "From hell's heart I stab at thee; for hate's sake I spit my last breath at thee!" Awesome, if the whole book is like this than it must kick ass. Wrong. Maybe I am a literary philistine but Melville is boring as hell. I maybe made it through three chapters when I just gave up. And I am sorry, but it is riddled with homo-erotic subtext. Not that there's anything wrong with that but it reminded a lot of watching the volleyball scene in Top Gun, as in "How exactly does this serve the plot?"

I also had a similar experience with Joseph Conrad feverishly working my way towards one fantastic quote while struggling with almost every other word. "Marlow" was a difficult man to follow.

Anyway, the point being that I am reading a novel because it will look good on my bookshelf. Probably not the kind of motivation that would lead people into a life of comparative lit.