Mr. Scatter has never been much of a list-keeper, and although he reads a lot of books and other products of the printing press he finds it easy to lose track of them. Their ideas and images become part of some vast quasi-literary soup of the subconscious, like the broken-down bits of verbiage in Jasper Fforde’s wry novel The Well of Lost Plots.

Mrs. Scatter is a seasoned list-maker, and she Keeps Track of Things. She is sometimes shocked by people who Do Not Keep Track of Things, so in her presence I attempt to downplay my disability.

“Can you imagine someone forgetting they’ve read a whole book!” she’ll say now and again. “I mean, a magazine article, OK. But how do you forget you read a book!”

I’m sure I don’t know.

Which is just to warn you that what follows is bound to be at least partly a work of fiction. I’ve decided for some reason I can’t quite fathom to take a beginning-of-the-decade accounting of the books I read in 2009, and arrange them into – yes, yes – a list. It will be faulty. And, don’t worry, it’ll be relatively brief: I won’t be mentioning the whole lot, only the ones that are still rattling around my brain with a fair amount of vividness. The ones, in other words, that successfully evaded becoming just part of the soup.

As near as I can figure in the aftermath, I read about 75 books in 2009: a decent clip, though still pretty minor-league compared to the truly devoted. I won’t pretend to be as catholic or compulsive in my reading habits as Art Scatter’s friend Rose City Reader, who consumes books the way a competitive professional eater downs hot dogs or oysters while training for the world championships; or as omnivorous as my erudite sister Laurel, who in 2009 almost accidentally read or reread all of Charles Dickens’ novels while maintaining a steady speed diet of the classics and a few contemporary books, some of them in foreign languages just to brush up on her linguistic skills. (This year she’s aiming at a slightly less prolific target, James Galworthy, in addition to her “regular” reading.)

I won’t be counting the small number of books on tape I listened to, which at any rate this year would amount only (as I recall) to the five volumes of Lloyd Alexander’s enjoyable Chronicles of Prydain fantasy series, slipped into the CD player of the Scattermobile to lessen the effect of teen/tween squabbling during long car voyages, and the first book and a half in Susan Cooper’s equally breathless The Dark Is Rising series, undertaken for the same reason.

Nor am I promising that I didn’t read one or two of these volumes in 2008. If so, it’s not that I’m trying to cheat. I just suffer from Faulty Memory Syndrome. And I’m quite sure I’ve read some books this past calendar year that I simply can’t remember having read at all. (Several of those would have been borrowed from the public library, leaving me no physical reminder of our brief flings.) Shocking, yet true. Please don’t tell Mrs. Scatter.

I’ll leave it to you and Dr. Freud to figure out the patterns inside this list. I’ll mention just one: In 2009 I reread a lot of books. This, I think, is a good thing. I’m branding repeat readings with an RR

And now, on with the list:

Continue reading Mr. Scatter’s excellent book adventure: Reading in 2009 →