I've noticed a tendency - call it a trend - amongst various Bloggers I keep up with to set a reading target. One hundred, one thousand - name the figure - volumes of poetry or novels or a combination of the two.

I find myself asking why?

There's the Woody Allen joke about taking a speed reading course and getting through 'War and Peace' in record time. "It's about Russia".

I find myself - there I am, again - walking in the opposite direction. Reading fewer books but (I hope) better.

What's the rush? What's the prize? Who's counting? A (self) justification of tenure? A peculiar sense of reading as capital?*

As, today, I reread some poems in Lisa Jarnot's 'Black Dog Songs' - the Early & Uncollected first section items. They're the right words for the one hour I have free.

put all the tea cups and the things
still left I never cannot name.


(from 'Altered States')

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* or: - as I noticed a colleague say over lunch - she was "embarrassed" not to have read Great Expectations. Why? Who can read everything that is worth reading? (And how insufferable such a person would be?)

I remember Derrida's insistence upon having read only a few books. After all, there's reading - and there's reading.