What to read next? A casual decision? Not here. Agonizing. Let me dope out why.

1.     I read slowly – and nothing worth reading isn’t worth reading slowly. I stick with the delicious, cooked with care. These days, food is cooked more carefully than prose. I meander on occasion into bookstores and opening recent releases at random, recoil as if from screeching chalk. How slackly, indifferently, unadventurously written, most of it. “But she tells a good story.” Only I don’t care about stories. Stories are a dime a dozen, armies grind them out, witness streaming TV. I seek prose I can chew, savor, a distinctive voice, words that might lift me like an eagle’s talons to scary heights. Such prose has been written – plentifully – but not much recently. Chatbot is our poet laureate.

2.     I do not read á la mode, to keep up. Amazon and others are forever pressing on me hot new talents. They do not tempt. The likelihood of any new book lasting makes the lottery look a safe bet. I trust time to do my threshing. If a book has survived a generation, maybe it’s worth a look; a century, definitely. Is this snobbery? I’d argue no. Isn’t it our moral responsibility to make the most of our time? Am I making the most by pouring crud into my brain?

3.     Consumerism biases us against rereading. It’s bad for business. By my lights, only rereading repays my time – that and deepening my awareness of topics that interest. Stravinsky said somewhere one shouldn’t judge music until one hears it six times (I think he said six). Six is too many rereadings – books take longer – but twice tests one’s earlier response – and for a poem one likes, six is too few. Rereading we encounter our younger selves. Critiquing earlier assessments enriches our experience of a text. (Too often, rereading tips a once-cherished writer out of favor. This is sad.)

4.     OK, with my testudinal reading pace, bias against recency, and avidity for proven excellence, I’ve narrowed my choices – to two lifetimes’ worth! How to determine which book to pluck from the dozens of houris on my shelf that winkingly await? Here’s where the anguish kicks in. Within reach of where I sit scribbling I might pick (in no particular order) Henry James, Borges, Hawthorne, Faulkner, Virginia Woolf, Shakespeare (never forget Shakespeare!), my teacher Robert Penn Warren, Dickens, books about Renaissance art or Vittoria Colonna or saints… oh, and Dr. Johnson, Kafka, Donne, Pope, Browning (Ms. And Mister), and I’m just getting started. Most of these I’ve read, but my memory’s a sieve – and I’ve changed, grown in some ways, shriveled (I fear) in others… Nor is my choice inconsequential. For whatever I pour into my brain will flavor my output, as chomped chives flavor a cow’s milk. Art’s a conversation and if I’m conversing with Emily Dickinson—I forgot Emily! – my brain will bend in her direction.

5.     These choices grow more serious and onerous as the insufferable clock ticks toward dead. Let’s say I’ve ten years left of lucidity. Let’s (generously) credit me with reading two books a month. That means, from an infinitude of possibilities, I’ve got room in my life for … 240? Can that be right? And I may not live that long – or retain my wits!

Friends urge me to think less about death. For me the opposite’s better counsel. Propinquity to extinction ratchets the suspense of these final years. I can hear the shouting at the finish line. I’m giving these final yards all I’ve got. But which title? Which?!!!!