When I was in school, we were supposed to keep reading over the summer, and to document our reading when we got back in September. We were given a long list of suggested books, handed an index card, and given time to write down the titles of the books (I don’t remember if we were supposed to read five, but that sounds right).

Every year, I struggled with that assignment, until one year, I thought to ask the teacher if I could put down books that weren’t on the list. “Of course,” she said, as if it was obvious.

So I filled several index cards, front and back, in the smallest handwriting I could manage. I listed science fiction, fantasy, high literature, poetry, and a number of books that I re-read over and over again. I had read fifty or sixty books at least over the summer, maybe more because I often read two books in a single day.

See, that assignment wasn’t meant for me. It was meant to make sure that reluctant readers didn’t lose ground over the ridiculously long summer vacation. I wasn’t a reluctant reader.

At this time of my life, I don’t take as much pride in that as I used to; I believed then that being a voracious reader was a sign of exceptional intelligence and all-around superiority. On reflection now, I know it was an escape. I could disappear into books. I didn’t particularly want to exist, back then, and books allowed me to go elsewhere, even when I was already going elsewhere.

I still read a lot, even though on the whole I have a wonderful life that I don’t want to escape. It’s not as easy to read as it used to be for me; my eyesight isn’t as good as it once was, and I don’t need to escape with the same urgency. Also, until I got my fancy leather recliner, I couldn’t sit for as long as I used to, and I’m not good at reading while walking any more (I still do it, mind you).

I’m thinking about this because yesterday, once I finished George Sanders’s Vigil, I was out of new books. The sturdy little bookshelf my adult kid gave me for Christmas was mostly empty. In it now, I only have a cookbook, a French textbook, my poem journals, a couple of guidebooks (New York City and Philadelphia), a crossword puzzle book, a book on color theory, and the manuscript of my current work-in-progress, which I have been avoiding until I am less critical of it.

You see, though I used to collect books, I don’t any more. So when I finish something, if I’m not going to re-read it or use it as a reference, I take it to the Little Free Library near me or return it to the actual Free Library. If it’s a reference book, and I don’t need it right away, I put it in my bedroom, where I have a reference bookcase.

That reference bookcase is where I got the book I’m reading now. it’s The Little Book of Beetles. I read it once already but I wanted to read something, and there it was. Any time I run out of things to read, I can read about beetles. Or handwriting, etymology, detective fiction, poetry, children’s literature, fantasy, or medicine. Or anything else. At least, that’s what my recently-read list tells me on The Storygraph.

I’m still making lists of what I read, you see. Partly I do it to avoid the problem I had the other day, where I cracked open a lovely new book I had bought on urban rats, and realized I had already read it a couple of years back.

Partly I do it for the same reason I covered all those index cards, to provide evidence.

That’s because some part of me still has that same feeling I used to get in September, when the teacher told us to write down what we had read over the summer, you see. I am quite sure that whatever I’m reading, it doesn’t count, not really. It’s not, usually, great literature. And even when it is great literature, I’m usually reading it for the wrong reasons. That is, I’m mostly reading it for entertainment.

That used to disconcert the heck out of my department members when I was an English department chair. I loved Paradise Lost because Satan was badass. I loved Dante’s Inferno because it was an exercise in retribution and vindictiveness as much as it was a glorious poem. Kafka is funny as hell, and Moby Dick is one of the weirdest, goofiest things I’ve ever read, just gloriously strange, sexy, and implausible

I guess my colleagues believed that great literature is a way to suffer productively. The heck with that. That way lies trying to force high school students to read over the summer.