You might remember that one of my New Year’s Resolutions for 2010 was to read 50 books, and to a certain extent you could probably consider that a project in and of itself. And it does require a certain time commitment, which is largely allotted to mass transit commute time. It also has a certain obsessiveness, even competitiveness (if only in that I compete with myself) built in, which might be what elevates it to a capital-P Project, because in my mind I am constantly calculating how many books I have lined up to read (no downtime is allowed, none at all; if I’m getting close to the end of one book I start carrying another book as well so that I can transition seamlessly and not waste five minutes on the Metro) and how long the current book I’m reading is and at what pages-per-day pace I’m getting through the current book and what books-per-month pace I’m setting for the year. And really hammering the point home (if the point is “what is WRONG with you?”) is the fact that reading books is something I love and passing time pleasantly when I’m stuck on the Metro is something I need, but the 50 Books A Year Project causes me no small amount of stress and grief, because to tell the truth I started the year off the pace by a good margin and I’m only now close to closing the gap. I’ve read fifteen books since January 1, and I’ll most likely finish the sixteenth today. I should be reading four or five each month, so at this point, 1/3 of the way through May, I should be finishing my nineteenth or twentieth. Part of the problem lies in some of my early choices: dense classics like Sons and Lovers in January and thousand-page epics like The Terror in February. So at this point I am actively selecting books that are a little on the slim side so that I can crank through them and pump up the bottom line tally. Which is kind of not in the spirit of the Resolution or the Project and is also more than a little insane in the membrane. But, I gotta be me.
And, to that point, it wouldn’t be me if I weren’t prone to inventing Projects within Projects. Which brings us to Beach Books on a Bus (henceforward known simply as BBB).
BBB started in July of 2008 when it became apparent that, because the little guy’s birth was imminent and I was saving all my paid time off for paternity leave, I was not going to get a week’s vacation at the beach. (To be fair, neither was my wife. To be fair, lots of people are working poor and never get paid vacations at all. I know. This is not their blog.) One of the most gratifying pleasures I have found in life is sitting on the beach and reading a book that is just trashy and fluffy enough to be perfect vacation entertainment, and that was the element of the not-in-the-cards beach trip I was going to miss the most.
As if to mock me, the Washington Post ran an article early that summer about the Ultimate Beach Books, as determined by some kind of poll. That helped me make up my mind to indulge in the reading material usually reserved for the vacation while slogging through my commute. Hence, Beach Books on a Bus. That year I read The Thorn Birds, Rosemary’s Baby, Devil in a Blue Dress, and Riders of the Purple Sage off the Post list, and I threw in Endymion, which is high sci-fi and the third part of a four-volume cycle I was into at the time. Riders of the Purple Sage was a bit creaky, but the rest were great, deserving Beach Reading Classics, and the whole BBB notion helped get me through the hazy, humid days of riding the bus lines and the rails in July and August.
The first year or so of his life, Little Guy was plagued with ear infections and I blew through a lot of paid time off on his sick days home from day care, so there was no proper summer vacation in 2009 either, and BBB 2 went into effect for two solid months. I read, in rapid succession: The Name of the Rose, Sick Puppy, The Spy Who Came In From The Cold, Fool Moon, The Count of Monte Cristo, A Feast for Crows, The Pillars of the Earth and The Clan of the Cave Bear. Some of those were leftovers from the Post article of the year before, and some were modern urban fantasy or sword-n-sorcery of my own discovery, but again, it was a nice way to commemorate summer while I was stuck at work.
Will there be a BBB 3 this year? Need you even ask? It will be inaptly named, since I no longer take the bus to work, but ah well. The centerpiece this year will most likely be Edgar Rice Burroughs’s classic pulp trilogy about John Carter of Mars - which inspires the picture above - because not too long ago there was a sweet hardcover collection on the discount table at Barnes & Noble and you best believe I snatched that right up. I’ve also got some Douglas Adams lined up (I’ve read the Hitchhiker’s books many times but never cracked the Dirk Gently books, which I plan to rectify) and a few other dimestore paperbacks I got at the used bookstore. Oh, and A Year in Provence, which my wife recommended and which struck me as vacation-appropriate. They are all sitting on my bedside table, intermixed with a few other books I will read in the near-term, while those all wait their turn in July.
Of course the punchline here is that this year we have a healthy little toddler, no imminent childbirth leave to save up PTO for, and ample time and resources to take a weeklong holiday at the beach. And we’re totally planning to do just that. So BBB 3 will either be interrupted by, or segue nicely into, a pleasant vacation at the actual beach. However, odds are I won’t be able to finish a single book at the beach, as I will be spending the vast majority of my time keeping my progeny from being carried off by feral hermit crabs or otherwise getting into enormous amounts of trouble in a strange, new place. Is that irony? I think it might be.
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