My Bedside Stack Of RIP Books
Next to my reading lamp on my bedside table lies a stack of RIP books. The line-up may vary every few weeks, but the stack itself is a permanent fixture in my bedroom.
8-Inch Tall Stack Of Books
War and Peace
Seven books make up the current stack, which stands 8-inch tall. The thickest of them props it up: a 2-inch-thick English translation of War and Peace, paperback, by Russian Leo Tolstoy. I lugged this book from Singapore to France during my last visit home.
My book collection back in Singapore had gathered dust for many years. As a result, my father decided to give some of the books away. During that visit, he wanted me to go through them and pick out the ones I wanted to keep. When my glance fell on War and Peace, still in mint condition, a wave of guilt crept over me. It is one of the classics I have promised myself I will read. In fact, I made that promise ten years ago in Singapore, and I still hadn’t kept it. With a renewed promise, I packed the hefty paperback in my luggage and flew it with me to France.
I bought War and Peace ten years ago, when I was still living in Singapore. Ten years have passed, and I have barely made a dent in this weighty tome. My only defensible excuse: I wasn’t living in Singapore for eight of those ten years. As a result, I neglected the book during the moving process. This classic is no easy read to begin with. For one, the tome runs 1,400 pages, and each translucent page crams in 40 closely spaced lines of small print. Since its arrival in France, I’ve ventured through only a few chapters. Still, they’ve barely brought me to the sixtieth page.
The Count of Monte Cristo
Sitting steadily on top of War and Peace is The Count of Monte Cristo (Volume 1). It’s by French author Alexandre Dumas, in its original language. Finishing the first volume of The Three Musketeers, by the same author, had boosted my confidence in my French. So last year, I decided to try my hand at Dumas’ other famous novel. Next to War and Peace, this book is more manageable, with its slightly bigger fonts printed on the 1000-page paperback. I am one third into it. With luck, I’ll finish it by the end of this year.
And the Remaining Five
The remaining five books of this stack, a mixture of French and English, are less formidable in appearance and contents. Lying gingerly on top of The Count of Monte Cristo is Émile Zola’s The Ladies’ Paradise. Right behind it comes Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray.
Hold on. I am not an intellectual snob who reads only classics. The other three books all come from contemporary authors. There’s British V.S. Naipaul’s A House for Mr Biswas, and German Patrick Süskind’s Perfume: The Story of a Murderer. Rounding out the three is Trois jours et une vie, by French Pierre Lemaitre. Two books are my recent purchases, having been in my acquisition for about a year. One of them is a book I borrowed a few months ago from Silviu, my husband.
RIP Books
These seven books are not the only books that are reading-in-progress (RIP). These are just seven out of the numerous RIP books in the apartment. Most of our books line the white 3-shelf bookcase in the hallway.
Why does it take me such a long time to finish one book? Why do I keep buying books when I still have a pile of RIP books to vanquish? Sometimes, when a book is riveting or a quick read, I devour it in a day or two. In the process, I end up neglecting my tasks or sacrificing my sleep. It used to happen quite frequently when I was much younger. In fact, I would be yawning all the time in class or at work after putting in an all-nighter. Nowadays, I get easily distracted when I read. Perhaps researchers are right. With age, one becomes more prone to distraction.
The books I place on my bedside table are the “books-du-jour.” They’re the ones I am currently focusing on, or at least making an attempt to. The daily obtrusive reminders—morning and night—prompt, exhort, beseech, and guilt me into picking the books up.
Out Of Sight, Out Of Mind
Whenever my eyes fall on the stack, a twinge of guilt will rear its ugly head for a few seconds. I will feel contrite enough to pick one up and read a few pages. My mood, and how the plot unfolds, decides how much I read. Some days it’s quite a few chapters at a time, several days running. If every book works out that way, I can clear a book within two weeks. But clearly, my reading pattern does not always work out that way.
The remorse I feel each time I see those books starts to fade as time passes. Meanwhile, my nonchalance towards the stack grows. Every three or four weeks, I take stock. If I haven’t made much progress on the stack, or my attention has drifted to another book, that’s my cue. Then I’ll bury a few books in the bedside table’s deep drawer, or move them to the bookcase instead. Out of sight, out of mind. So, I won’t have daily reminders of how I’ve neglected these books.
Falling Into The Rabbit Hole
I usually grab one of the books from the stack at random. Well, not really random as it also depends on whether I feel I have had done enough French reading lately. If I have not practised enough French, I will gravitate myself towards a French book. Regardless of the book I pick, I get many a time distracted somewhere along the way.
I might reach for my Samsung phone to look up a word I’ve just come across in the book. The search may lead me to glancing cursorily at the social media and email notifications on my phone. It can be an innocuous late-night work email (not the fault of the sender, of course) that sets me off. Suddenly I’m thinking about creating new content for upcoming lessons. I’ll promise myself just a quick search online. Mainly, I want to see what kind of interesting classroom activities I can adopt for my students. The quick search can potentially turn into an hour-long exhaustive search, adding 20 English-learning websites to my list of favourites. Meanwhile, the book itself remains barely touched.
The Instagram Rabbit Hole
The distraction can be a notification too: a multi-colour camera icon sitting on the left corner of my phone screen. The notification calls out wordlessly, imploring me to check things out. Turns out, someone on Instagram has recently liked one of my photo posts.
If the posts are amazing travel photoshoots, I might dig for more information on the photo location. Maybe its geography, its history, or its culture. One thing leads to another. By the time I put down the phone, a couple of hours have already passed. That’s how deep the Instagram rabbit hole goes.
The Literary Rabbit Hole
Then, there are times when some trivial detail in the book piques my interest. Maybe it cites other books, or other authors. Such information oft-times leads me to a literary rabbit hole. If the search results on the book — or on the writer — engage me enough, that settles it. So, I’ll try to get hold of the book. There are a few ways I can go about doing it. An English book, I’d search for on OverDrive, a free library service tied to my Singapore National Library membership. It gives me access to digital content — e-books, e-magazines, audiobooks. Failing that — which is rare — I’d buy it from Amazon. A French book, on the other hand, I’d simply buy from a bookstore.
For instance, this was how it led me into buying The Ladies’ Paradise by Émile Zola. I came across his name when I was reading about the Alfred Dreyfus Affair in a French history book. The affair was a political scandal, involving Émile Zola, that marked French history at the end of the 19th century. A quick online search provided me with his profile and books, from which I chose The Ladies’ Paradise. In this case, I hadn’t even finished the original history book I was reading. Yet I added another one to my RIP books.
A Fellow Bibliophile
Silviu and I are both bibliophiles. Like me, he has his share of physical books and e-books (through Kindle). He gravitates more towards non-fiction books and literary books, and his readings are split 50/50 between these two categories. As for me, I spend half of my time reading genre fiction. The remaining half splits between literary books (40%) and non-fiction (10%). As such, our tastes overlap occasionally. One of the seven books in the current bedside stack, A House for Mr Biswas by British V.S. Naipaul, is a purchase of Silviu.
There’s my bedside stack of RIP books, the RIP books on the bookcase (mine and Silviu’s). And then there are the RIP e-books, on OverDrive and Kindle. I don’t see myself clearing or shrinking the RIP books anytime soon.
Tsundoku: An impulsion to possess books with an intention of reading them, but ultimately creating stacks of unread books.
On top of that, there’s the “To-read” stack—books already in my possession that I have yet to even start! This reminds me of a word in Japanese: Tsundoku. This word aptly captures the impulsion to possess books with the intention of reading them. But it ultimately just creates a stack of unread ones—in my case, lots of RIP and To-read books. Perhaps Tsundoku is a product of the consumerist society that we are living in. It might also be the Fear of Missing Out (FOMO)—missing out on good reads. Or maybe there are simply other justifiable reasons. Regardless of the reasons, a stack of books will always accompany my sleep.