I consider myself to be a pretty laid back person. Sometimes I stress out about being late for work, or missing an important phone call, or finding myself in a situation without access to snacks. Little things. However, lately I've developed a new kind of anxiety and it feels like it's growing inside me like a big gray cloud. You see, I've recently joined a book club. And an article club. Both convene on a monthly basis (oftentimes one right after the other, which is just stressful). Yet I enjoy reading (and desperately want to read) material that falls outside the category of book club book or article club articles. Furthermore, I subscribe to The New York Times. And TIME. AndThe New Yorker. (Each week it arrives and I feel simultaneously glad and deflated—I will simply never, ever read more than half of it.)
My problem is this: there is so much to read. So many wonderful choices and formats and recommendations. And I am starting to realize I simply can't read them all. Between the books I committ to reading for book club, the books I'm given to read, and the books I say I'm going to read someday, I'm in over my head. What about all those lists? I can't wrap my head around "The 100 Books Everyone Should Read," let alone "July's 10 Books to Look Out For." The other day I spent nearly an hour reading through greeting cards to try to find the right one, stopped short and thought, I'm 27 years old and I haven't read Moby Dick OR The Grapes of Wrath, and I'm wasting time on this?
I can read and read and read and I'll only ever make a tiny dent in the endless collection of gorgeous and worthy things to read. Maybe you feel the same way?
Well, in this week's issue of The New Yorker, I stumbled upon a line that so perfectly encompasses how I'm feeling. It's from an article called "Ghosts in the Stacks" by Christine Smallwood. The article is really about discovering forgotten books and intentionally choosing random, lesser-known titles to read, as opposed to the ones Amazon tells you to buy. One sentence in this article literally made me say "YES" out loud.
"Rose has two fears: that there are worthy books out there that she hasn’t read, and that there are worthy books out there that no one is reading, that have been forgotten, and fallen into the great unknown."
Rose and I share this same fear. (Who is Rose? I don’t know. I didn't read the whole article due to aforementioned issue above.) There are worthy books that I am going to never read. And there are worthy books that less and less people are reading for reasons we can't understand, and eventually those books will be basically unread. And maybe I'm reading a book that's not so great, but book club says I should read it, so I do, and I miss out on a different better book that could have really changed my life. I know I sound paranoid. As Smallwood so aptly put it in The New Yorker, it's kind of like FOMO ("Fear of Missing Out" for those of you who have missed out on this trendy acronym), but for books. I guess we can call it FOMOOB (Fear of Missing Out on Books).
Too dramatic maybe. And that acronym is definitely not going to stick. But still, I think about it a lot. Though the takeaway is that my FOMO is really a luxury. I love to read. There are people who don't read at all. By choice! That, in my opinion, is where the real FOMO should be setting in. And then there are people who don't read because they don't have the access or the means or the guidance they need to do so, in which case this post seems awfully frivolous, and my anxiety terribly inconsequential.
image via jmcphotos
