Meanwhile, the assigned book for review was a stew of political theory mumbo jumbo as written by a team of second-rate grad students. When Tobias wasn’t wailing at me for not sleeping him right, I was scowling at the terrible book. Every moment, baby or book, was a misery. I wrote a scathing review. My editor assured me I’d done readers a service. People have limited time for books, and the job of reviewers is to help them make choices.
Most people in the throes of parenting have little time to read. Instead, time is spent strategizing how to meet the barest requirements of adulthood, with reading a vice snuck on the sly like an afternoon cocktail. My lifelong requirement to read before bed, no matter how late the hour and preceded by a vastly underestimating “I just need to read one page,” now actually often ends at exactly that: one page. So much energy is expended dashing frantically from task to task that the sporadic slap to the forehead, “I forgot about Bob!” has escalated in frequency. By the time I remember to note a book in his pages, I sometimes have to struggle to remember the title. Twenty minutes more sleep at night would surely enhance that ability. But who has time for that?
There’s nothing unusual about the no-time-for-books complaint, but it feels like a fireable offense when reading is your job. Publishers, editors, authors, fellow readers know you can’t read everything, but expect it anyway. I kind of expect it, too. If I tell someone I’m going to read a book, I do. It’s that hard-to-shake feeling that someone will ferret out the lapse if you don’t. “You there,” I half expect someone to corner me and say. “What did you make of chapter seven?” Half my book-related conversations seem to begin with someone asking, “Have you read X or Y book?” followed by a doleful, “No, have you?”
Also, I read worse. Some studies allege that child rearing makes people smarter, that we learn to anticipate dangers that operate at the .001 percent level of likelihood, to perform Olympic feats of multitasking, to jump in with adrenaline surges of mastery when necessary. I’m not so sure. Each additional child has only weakened my base multitasking skills and frayed my attention span. I have less time and energy to devote to abstract thought. Sleeplessness seems to have worn the bearings of an already faulty memory, child after child after child chipping away at what once was known. There’s a too-true Roz Chast cartoon about the aging brain’s incapacities: whenever new information goes in (tabloid gossip), something must go out (algebra). The accumulating necessities of small children—the checkups, orthodontic visits, outgrown shoes, broken bones, surgeries, convalescences—take a brutal toll, withering my mental capacity in sad counterpoint to my children’s elastic and expanding minds.
At least kids force you to prioritize. You learn to let go of the bad books more easily and savor the good. Each moment becomes a calculation, and there is always an opportunity cost. Rather than spend this time reading dreck, what could you be doing instead?
When Beatrice was four months old, I went on tour for my second book, and she came along. I’d pass her to my mother as I stood swaying from lack of sleep in front of bookstore audiences, unable to find my place in my own book or to recognize the text within as something I’d been remotely involved in. Next, Beatrice accompanied me to Washington. My husband and I had driven down so I could testify before Congress about my research on the very child-unfriendly subject of pornography. By then Beatrice was a fairly reasonable six-month-old. But so preoccupied was I with the pumping of milk and the timing of the nap and the questionable opacity of the window shades in the hotel room that it wasn’t until my husband deposited me in front of the Capitol that I realized I’d neglected to prepare my testimony.
Here I was, about to talk about hard-core pornography in the halls of Congress. Senator Sam Brownback was sponsoring me, and Senator Orrin Hatch, forever imprinted in my mind holding a copy of The Exorcist during the Anita Hill–Clarence Thomas hearings, was there, too. It felt like some kind of diabolical dream sequence, but it was real and it was up to me to wing it. Months later, after the fog of early motherhood lifted, I picked up a photograph taken that day of me, surrounded by senators. I was wearing a miniskirt, which basically isn’t allowed in Washington, and an inappropriately enormous smile, eyes dazed. I vaguely recall having a deeply personal conversation with Sam Brownback about his men’s group.
Now that I had three small children, the number of books I pick up has dropped precipitously, and, with it, the number of books I put down completed. My Book of Books is a rather unkind reminder of this. Though I didn’t think to enumerate my entries in Bob until the list was well into the three hundreds, once I did, the enterprise was unavoidably tarnished. How can you not feel smug about the growing tally? How can you not be eager to add yet another number to the list?
But therein lies danger. The numbers do not, alas, tick upward at a steady rate, and you can easily gauge just how much you’ve “fallen behind.” Have you read as many books this March as you did last? What’s your yearly average? What of the long books that slow you down: Vanity Fair, Hamilton, The Pickwick Papers? Could they not somehow count doubly?
Graphic novels, illustrated works, Dover thrift editions, Penguin 60s, reread books: all of this can feel like cheating. (Even I draw the line at picture books, which do not make it into Bob, much as it would favor the average.) It would be dishonest to deny that part of me sometimes wants to just finish a book already, especially a bad one, so I can move up another digit on my way to the next even hundred.
These ambitions aside, Bob reflects an inexorable decline, its rate dropping in response to accumulated responsibilities, children birthed and tended, piled-up magazines, the dumb side of the Internet. Now, when I should be reading, I find myself instead gazing at baby pictures on my phone or scrolling through Twitter bytes instead. In the year after college graduation, when I was living in Thailand, I read seventy-six books, including whoppers like Moby-Dick, aided considerably by a sporadic level of employment. The following year, in New York and fully employed, the number slipped to thirty-four. Early on, a boyfriend had criticized me for tallying my books and I had balked. Bob and I had nothing to prove! But the truth was, it did matter. My private reading life, as many aspects of private life after parenthood, can easily slip away.