Howdy, Acolytes!

Memphis is a surprisingly good town for a reader. This has much to do with the way that summer here is so goddam hot that all one wants to do is sit naked in front of an AC unit with a beer. Such immobility lends itself very well to reading, and it's one of the curses and blessings of books, and the curses and blessings of books are what I want to talk to you about.

My name is Colin, I'm 28, and I've been a reader all my life, or since age seven, anyway, when I participated in Lake Louise elementary school's "Read-Aloud Crowd". I had the book The House with a Clock in its Walls read to me by my Mom, and for this non-feat won a trip to the Museum of Science and Industry. I would still recommend this book to anybody, by the way. What could be a better intro to the universe of letters than a story about bright, apple-cheeked kids raising evil corpses from the dead? Nothing, of course. I maintain, to this day, a great love of evil, reanimated corpses, but now I tend to get that fix from the movies.

So, why am I doing this? I guess what fired me up to try the new-fangled blogging thing was a statistic I heard the other day (you'll find I'm a person who is troubled perhaps too much by statistics; I've been hoarding canned goods and sucking my thumb since I saw An Inconvenient Truth). What I heard is this: people in their forties read 10% less than people in their fifties, and people in their twenties read 10% less than people in their thirties, and so on down the line.

I find this ominous, not only because I'm an aspiring writer, but also because it reminds me of my absolute favorite quote: W.C. Fields said that "Life is a banquet, and everywhere you look some poor son of a bitch is starving to death." I doubt he was talking about reading, specifically, but more about using your time on earth to enjoy the full spectrum of pleasures. To me reading is the main course at the bar-b-que of the arts, and art accounts for a little over half of that aforementioned pleasure spectrum. Books get us all the way to ROY G, and that's nothing to sneeze at. Sure, a lot of people go in for BIV and BIV alone, and I'm not faulting them–I think bowling's awesome too– but if BIV was all I had I'd be pretty bored pretty quick.

Has the world reached a point where it no longer wants or needs books? I'm afraid it has. I'm trying be a writer, as I mentioned earlier, and the decline of readership wouldn't worry me so much if I was better at it. I am, at best, a B- writer, and I don't think the industry can support anything less than A+'s anymore. So what do I do? I do what I can. I buy books, I write, I light a candle and sing hymns and ritually smack my head with a splintery board. Mostly, I start a blog to talk about reading and life.

So let me tell you about The Stack.

The Stack is a complete denial of conservation physics: it gets taller, it gets shorter, parts are added, parts taken away, but it never disappears. It's the three foot, papery monster that sits by my turntable, flipping me the bird and scratching itself. It's the books I have (for some reason) paid for, and that I'm determined to read. I do not remember a time when The Stack didn't, in some form, exist. If you're a reader you might understand this urge to hoard, or if not understand then at least recognize it and sympathize, as one junky to another.

This blog is about my ongoing struggle with The Stack, and I hope you will join me as I duke it out. There's four things I want you know on the front end (and these will be placed at the front of every posting).

1. I'm not a genius. I just like books.
What qualifies me to write about books? Absolutely jack shit. Nothing. Nada. My undergrad degree wasn't even in English, and while I am currently pursuing an MFA in creative writing, I'm confident that I'm one of the worst students in the history of my program. After two and a half years I'm still a little hazy about what "modernism" actually means. So don't talk theory with me, we won't get far. I want to shoot the breeze about books, not dissect them. Also, I'm self-editing, so forgive the occasional typo.

2. I'm not exactly topical.
What ends up in The Stack is governed by no other force than my mood the last time I was at the bookstore. It's a mixed bag, you're going to get novels, history, biography, science and whatever else. Some of the books will be current, many will not. It could be David Sedaris this week and Homer the next. But that's how people read, isn't it?

3. I can be a little off-task at times.
I'm a culture junky and I have adult ADD, so forgive me if I get a bit tangential. While I love books more than anything else, I might occasionally have something I'm dying to say to you about movies or music or TV, bear with me.

4. I never claimed to have good taste.
This last one is important. I love Filet Mignon, but sometimes I just want a damn cheeseburger. It won't all be Anna Karenina around here, as you'll find out when I get around to Bruce Campbell's biography If Chins Could Kill (currently at the bottom of The Stack).

So, I guess that's it for now. Stay tuned, folks, next week I'll be talking about The Inferno, Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian, and Rebecca Solnit's River of Shadows: Edweard Muybridge and the Technological Wild West.