39 Books: 2010

This series has sailed into the doldrum years. Reading has become less of a headlong existential adventure than something one does, a pastime, a hobby, something you tell a quiz show presenter how you relax: "I like to read, Brad."

By this time I had given up reviewing elsewhere. After reading had got me to university, a job, my own place, a new life, I assumed that writing for print venues was the natural progression. Instead, it made me ill. The head injury had side effects nobody had warned me to expect and the tide returned me to the remote island of blogging. Anyway, what can be worse than a literary professional?

This is not a photograph of a book I own. I bought a copy as a gift, no doubt wishing to spark in another what reading had sparked in me, and leafed through carefully to read each page without soiling the paper, and then sent it on its way, something I've regretted ever since. I doubt it was ever read. Not regret for losing the book as something to read and reread – Schalansky's story of the moai of Easter Island is inaccurate – as losing its presence as a token of regret, of what the book itself regrets, the regret that enables it, the success of regret, the deepest pleasure of reading.