In high school, we were supposed to keep reading over the summer. Therefore, every September, we were given the 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.

In tenth grade, I asked the teacher if I could put down books I had read that weren’t on the list. “Of course,” she said, as if it should be obvious.

Whereupon 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 every year. I had read fifty or sixty books at least over the summer, maybe more, because I often read two books in a single day. That assignment wasn’t meant for me. It was meant to make sure that reluctant readers didn’t lose ground over the ridiculously long American summer vacation.

I wasn’t a reluctant reader. I just didn’t read things I didn’t want to read.

I don’t take as much pride in my reading now as I used to; then, I believed that being a voracious reader was a sign of superiority. In my case, it was a sign of being overwhelmed. I didn’t particularly want to exist, back then, and books allowed me to go elsewhere, even when I was already going elsewhere. I could disappear into books.

Even though I don’t have anything to escape now, I still read a lot. It’s not as easy to read as it used to be; my eyesight isn’t as good as it once was, and I have other things I do with my time.

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. At the moment, there’s only 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.

I used to collect books. I don’t any more. 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 library. If it’s a reference book, and I don’t need it right away, I stash 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 needed 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 website where I log my books.

I’m still making lists of what I read, you see, but I’m not doing it to prove anything to a teacher. 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; that happens too often.

Yet 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.