because weekends are for books

I don't read enough. Certainly not now that I'm a writer. It's a problem I'm quite embarassed about and often view as my ironically Woody Allenish "film director who goes blind" achilles heel. The fact is I did read voraciously as a student, but as I've grown up (or down, depending on your view), I've just had trouble both making the time and concentrating on a book once I've got a few free minutes. Yoga is helping me be less easily distracted. So is leaving my laptop in my trunk overnight so I can't check my e-mail for 12 hours a day. Still, since I've decided that returning to books as much as possible is very smart for me, I ocassionally review some. (Not that I don't read books I don't review, but there's nothing like having to say something intelligent about a book to get you to read it carefully more than once and then, you know, think about it.) Which brings me to my thoughts on Jonathan Lethem's forthcoming  collection of personal culture essays entitled "The Disappointment Artist." The book, which I highly recommend, is due out soon, and my review of it will run in the San Francisco Chronicle Book Review (stay tuned for its online posting). For now I will simply say that it really caused me to think very carefully about why, in fact, I may not obsess over books (and even music) anymore. How did it accomplish this feat? Here is a choice quote from the book about a child who never felt like he fit in and who therefore indulged in obsessive cultural consumption to craft a better, more friendly and stimulating imaginary world to call home: "Attempting to burrow and disappear into the admiration of certain works of art,” he writes, “I tried to make such deep and pure identification that my integrity as a human self would become optional, a vestige of my relationship to the art… I downloaded art into myself, but I was also downloading myself out of my family, my body, and my life, onto a bookshelf of Complete Works… I asked too much [of the works]: I asked them also to be both safer than life and a better family… The disappointment artist was me.”