why A List of Books?

For a long time I wanted to be a celebrity. Vanity aside for the moment, I had good intentions. I wanted to tell people to do good things. I wanted to inspire and persuade an audience, as large as possible, to make this world better. In the same conversation that inspired my interest in sustainable design, my brother asked me "why don't you just do the good things that you want to tell other people to do?"

"A Summer's Reading" by Bearnard Malamud is a short story that first appeared in the New Yorker in September of 1956 (available to New Yorker Subscribers here and also available on the iTunes New Yorker fiction podcast). The protagonist, George Stoyonovich, is a young high school dropout with time on his hands and no summer job. He runs into Mr. Cattanzara, a man from town who foreshadows George’s fear of his own life down the road. One day Mr. Cattanzara holds a conversation with George, at which point, ashamed of his current situation, he tells Mr. Cattanzara of fictional plans to read from a list of 100 books he found at the library to enhance his education. It was a plan told out of earnest, something George wanted to do but just never got around to.

Word spread of George’s self-generated educational pursuits. People in town looked at him differently, George felt better about himself for a while. After a month or so George started to feel anxious about his situation. He kept meaning to read books, but when he did he quickly lost interest in them. Soon his anxiety affected his relationships with everyone around him. In one conversation with Mr. Cattanzara who knew something was amiss, he was offered the following advice, “George, don't do what I did."

As the summer’s heat mimicked George’s frustration it caused him to erupt and overflow into the streets where he realized no one else in town knew he hadn’t read the books. They still treated him with admiration and respect as if he had. He could easily have gone on telling people he read those books, but it was Mr. Cattanzara’s words, and George’s own conscience that drove him to the library where he sat down at a table and started reading.

A List of Books is the symbolic relationship I have to all the things I have ever wanted to do in my life. Unless I am doing those things right now, I do not want to do them enough.