Something that’s been bothering me lately is the difficulty I have remembering books these days. If you throw out the title of something I know I’ve read, I can usually summon an impression of whether I liked or disliked it, and maybe some quality that contributed to said impression (e.g., it was pretentious, it was fun, etc.), but the specifics of plot, character, style, the writer’s voice… these details have more often than not evaporated from my brain without a trace.

It didn’t used to be this way. I used to have excellent recall, and I don’t know if the change is a consequence of getting older, or of having so many more concerns competing for my attention now that I’m a grown-up, or even because of some mundane thing like not getting enough sleep or something. Whatever the cause, I don’t like it. I mean, I really don’t like it. Recently, I tried keeping a book journal to try and help my retention. I failed utterly, giving in to procrastination and ultimately abandoning the thing after only three or so completed books. My efforts at reviewing books here on the blog haven’t been any better.

And so I’ve been struggling to accept the reality that, even though I’m more or less constantly reading, not much of that effort is sticking. It’s hard not to feel like some kind of failure, or to worry that I’m getting old and losing something that used to be effortless, or to wonder if I was just fooling myself for all those years that I thought I was such a literary person.

Apparently, I’m not the only one:

In fact, an afterglow is about all that is left to me of many – maybe most – of the books I have read, and, as age advances, less and less of what I read is retained in any solider form. The one thing I liked about Nicholson Baker’s U And I was his frank admission that, of the Updike he had read, he remembered very little indeed – and wasn’t going to look again to refresh his memory (well, that’s how I remember it anyway, and I’m certainly not going to check Baker again).

 

Does it matter how much we remember of books? Does it matter even if no memory at all is available to our conscious mind? I know I must have read large numbers of books that I don’t even remember reading – occasionally I find myself reading one, and realise I’m actually rereading… What I like to think is that the better ones (of the books I do at least remember reading) have left some beneficial trace at a level somewhere just below the conscious, retrievable memory – an afterglow, an aura, a faint fragrance… Or maybe I’m deluding myself?

Do books leave a residue somewhere in the unconscious mind? I hope they do. It’s nice to imagine so, anyway…
(Via Sullivan.)