My Life with Bob

My Life with Bob: Flawed Heroine Keeps Book of Books, Plot Ensues by Pamela Paul
Published: 2017
Narrated by: Eileen Stevens, Pamela Paul
Length: 06:55 (242 pages)

I’m a huge fan of books about books. I think anyone who spends time reading book blogs will probably also love the genre. I’m not entirely sure what draws me to these, especially since many don’t really dig deeply into the contents of the books, but I think I just enjoy reading about how books are important to people.

Pamela Paul is the editor of The New York Times Book Review and has been keeping a list of each book she’s read since she was in her teens. It’s a notebook that she’s carried around the world with her, through different jobs and different relationships, and she calls it Bob (Book of Books). The fact that it’s a paper notebook gives me a lot of anxiety (please have some sort of electronic backup process), but I do love the idea. I think there’s something more personal about writing the date and book manually in a notebook than filling out a form on Goodreads.

It’s not such a revolutionary idea these days, in a world where the book-obsessed often track their reading on Goodreads, LibraryThing, or a spreadsheet, but the amount of time she’s been doing this and how she’s able to relate the contents to her personal life is what makes it interesting. She doesn’t write a detailed review for each book, just merely jots down the date, author, title, and a couple of notations for certain categories – which language, where the book was read, whether the author or book was new to her, etc. From those notes, she was able to see certain trends in her reading, such as how her location would dictate her book choices. She doesn’t tend to get into many of the plot details of the books in this memoir, although she does cover the entire ending of Kafka’s The Trial, but rather focuses on how those books related to her life.

For the past seven (!) years, I’ve written a post on every book that I’ve read, and while I have occasionally lost the thread and found myself mentally comparing this to homework, I’m glad I’ve started doing this. If I wasn’t posting it on this blog, I’d still been keeping notes offline. I have a terrible memory, and sometimes thinking back I can’t remember exactly what I thought of a book, but a quick review of my write-up, even if it doesn’t necessarily cover the plot or my opinion of the book, manages to bring back most of my thoughts. I’ve actually found this helpful quite a few times. It’s also just satisfying to build up lists.

Thoroughly enjoyed this. Her writing is funny and smart, and it’s just a bookish love-fest from start to finish. She’s also the editor of By the Book, the collection of sixty-five author and artist interviews that answer a questionnaire on the books they love and are currently reading, and this was a good reminder that I need to pick that up as well.