I just noticed that Pamela Paul has gotten a memoir out of her list of all the books she’s read since 1988 — My Life with Bob: Flawed Heroine Keeps Book of Books, Plot Ensues. I too have such a list, starting in 1987! She looks a good deal younger than me so she must have started the list at an impressively early age.

Although I have the list, even if such was my bent, I guess the memoir path is closed to me — been done. I actually started keeping records several years before that, but an ex-wife tossed out the book in which I was keeping my records. She claimed this was unintentional. My current list is in a dummy Bible (i.e. a thing that looks like a Bible but has no type inside, or in this case outside either). Should last me. Periodically I enter the titles into FileMaker Pro on my laptop, so the whole thing is searchable.

Pamela Paul’s book provoked Robert Gray into musing at Fresh Eyes Now on the fact that maintaining such a list might rather cramp your style when it comes to pretending to have read a book. Although I don’t do this a lot, I doubt if the existence of my BoB would inhibit me at all. I can’t remember, without looking them up, the books I read in 1996 (heck, even 2016 for that matter. Some of the titles I even have difficulty recognizing at all!) so why should I hesitate to claim to have read a title which might in fact turn out not to be there. One case he cites, that of assuring an author, falsely, that you have read and loved his book, always seems to me to be deeply fraught with potential disaster, and I have never done it. After all, if you express fervent delight, the author may feel the need to engage you in further chat about especially brilliant gems from the text. Much better to tell the truth, or at worst, the half-truth “I’ve started it” — after all reading the title could be regarded as a start.