When she was 17, The New York Times Book Review editor Pamela Paul decided to start writing in a journal. It wouldn't be any of the standard things, she thought—not a diaristic retelling of people and events, or a writer's notebook for drafting and reflection. Her project, instead, would be a “book of books” (or “Bob, for short): an ongoing list of what she's read, each title numbered sequentially with the author's name, starting with Franz Kafka's The Trial. Almost three decades later, she's still at it.
In her new memoir, My Life With Bob, Paul looks back at her life in reading, with defining episodes framed by entries from The Master and Margarita to The Hunger Games. Throughout, Paul celebrates the power books have to transport us, to lift us almost bodily into distant lands and the dilemmas of other people. At the same time, she explores the way books also draw us inward, becoming repositories for our memories and private wishes. In a conversation for this series, Paul explained how some entries in her book of books have the power to viscerally conjure up the past, like Proust's famous madeleine.
Paul describes her reading habit like a hunger than can't be satiated, that grows, instead, with each new morsel she devours. The book seems haunted by this realization, the plain fact that no one can read it all—no matter how many built-in shelves she hammers up, no matter how their shelves sag with weight. As Paul puts it: “The more you read, the more you realize you haven't read; the more you yearn to read more, the more you understand that you have, in fact, read nothing.” We discussed how she's dealt with this anxiety not only in her own life but as the editor of the Book Review, where decisions about what to feature (and not) help shape the tastes of the broader public—the things we will or won't get to in our own limited time as readers.
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