What will follow

I would guess that there are over 600 books in my home that I have either read poorly or not read at all. Four Putnam ladders, two with ten rungs, two with nine rungs, hold about 15 books/rung. There are books in my cupboard where most people have emergency canned goods. What is to be done? I hope to change my fundamental relationship to these books. I hope to reclaim literature as experience from the clutches of literature as artifact.

My goal is to get every drop from every book in my house. Here, high-proof Applejack distilled from each book, digitized, then presented in white text on a black background (the obverse of the text's original imprint), will be all that remains of my reading experience. Which is hard. My books until this point have been autobiography--marginalia as photo album. Some of them I will probably never review, because I can't imagine being rid of those editions--see Jest, Infinite and Odyssey, The.

I'm also terrified of my addiction to the internet and the deterioration of my attention. I was hoping this might help (but somewhere between the last paragraph and this one I ordered Wittgenstein's Mistress by David Markson and The Apes of God by Wyndham Lewis).

After I finish these books, assuming this blog is still an active part of my day, I will post reviews on all of the Penguin Twentieth Century Classics. The full list can be found here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Penguin_20th_Century/Modern_Classics

At a glance, I've read about half the list(I used to look for the turquoise spine in Austin's Half Price Books). It would be good to reread a lot of those (Omensetter's Luck has been screaming for a closer look for the past year). Well that's on the horizon.

The reviews themselves will be in the spirit of NYRB, tangential and aimed to showcase my own ideas as much as those of the author of the source text. With this approach I hope to make the blog Will's Review of Books rather than the Review of Will's Books.

So. Here we go.