Look Inside My Media Mind

Three years ago, I started to keep a list of the books I’ve read.

Just a simple bulleted list in Notion, divided into fiction and non fiction. I start a new toggle heading for each year, and this year I started dividing the list into months.

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I realize this is something that people do publicly on social media or Goodreads or some such. It seems like this is often associated with gamified self-improvement goals. And more power to ‘em. (You?) I can definitely appreciate a good gamified situation.

However, I have zero goals attached to my list. I don’t care how many books I read in a year or how it compares to the previous year. Although I obviously am capable of counting them up, I don’t do it. There are times I read more, times I read less. The variables seem to be about how I’m feeling generally — if I’m not feeling well, I’m reading more. And also the book’s format: I tend to read books faster if they’re available digitally simply because I can read them in anywhere. (The Kindle App on my phone is an MVP.) But since I borrow all books from the library, I take them in the format I can get.

I am generally okay with reading time flexing around other things in my life. Although it is true that since I learned to read I’ve never not had one book or more on the go — at least in the absence of genuine life-altering unpleasant events.*

Before you think this is some self congratulatory exercise on my part —I doubt “watch more television” is a common self improvement goal, but I keep the same list for the television shows I watch. **

So as I started my list for August, I started to wonder: why do I do this? And why do I like it? And why/why not share it? (Spoiler, I will share it.)

Why do I keep these lists?

A few reasons:

I started these lists during the pandemic. When so many other experiences went away, it made it so clear that what I read and watched give my internal life texture.

Also, the media I consume influences what I imagine and think and dream, which in turn influences what I create. This happens on a mostly unconscious level, and possibly is more intense for me than for others.

For example, over the many years I did journalism, I was almost entirely unable to read fiction. It just repelled my attention. I think I was subconsciously was protecting myself from confusion from imaginary worlds bumping up against the reality I was drawing on for my work. Then, about a year after I set journalism aside and it felt pretty final, my mind opened to fiction again. (I know there are many journalists who read fiction, and have no issue with it. For whatever reason, that wasn’t me.)

And then there is just the human instinct to document, more or less present in us all. My memory is really good at some things (conversations) and pretty crap at other things. I definitely do not remember what I read a couple of months ago off the top of my head. Occasionally I will look at a title — even of a book I liked! - and initially blank on what it was about. I think this is also a relic of my busiest writing days, when I’d immediately purge my brain of things from the last article I wrote to accommodate the next.

Why do I like making these lists?

When writing was my main creative output, it was never too hard to understand my creative projects — that was kind of the point of them, working out why I was interested in a subject. (This mini essay is a case in point.) But now that I primarily make visual art, these lists help me to understand what I create in a different way. I

n mid 2022 I started breaking my list out into months rather than just keeping an annual list. This was to help me trace connections with the art I’ve made.

Also they are a different kind of record of my existence. For me, these lists are as interesting to look back at the photos I take of my life.

Why haven’t I shared them?

Ok kids, gather ‘round while I tell you about growing up before the internet, while never knowing a professional life without it. I am among the last of this group — email became a thing when I was in college.

I suppose there is another story to tell at some point about my evolving relationship to sharing things about my life with the public, whether mediated, as in professionally published —or unmediated, like social, like this. My sense is others have covered this ground already, but we’ll see.

My instinct has been to pull back from sharing for various reasons, many of which I’m not ready to talk about publicly, irony noted.

For now, the most succinct summary probably is this: I don’t want to create more free “content” to be “monetized” by platforms owned by dickbags.

As I reimagine and rebuild my own site, though, I realized a) this list was a natural here, b) and this is crucial! it is no extra work. I can just publish the Notion list I make for myself.

So that’s why there will be no links to the books, no commentary, just a list as I make it.

Maybe I’ll change this at some point, but for now, this is my manifesto and here is the live list.

*This is actually something I’ve only learned in the last twelve years or so. When I’m truly bone rattled (not like any old garden variety trauma, think the midnight call from a hospital involving airlifting, sudden divorce, that level of extremis.) I don’t have the focus to read for a while. The first time it happened I was truly shocked and worried my ability to lose myself in a book was gone forever. Now I know better but it’s still adding insult to injury IMO.

**And I have lists for movies which I’m including here. I also have a list for art exhibits, but since I left NYC that’s gotten a lot shorter and so I’m not sharing it. I started a list for podcasts but I found that too tedious for whatever reason and stopped.