Recommended reading

A FEW DAYS AGO, I was asked by a magazine to weigh in about my favorite book of 2006. Actually, I was asked twice, not because my recommendation was in such demand but because I’d ignored the first e-mail after realizing, with no small degree of shame, that I couldn’t recall the last book I’d read, at least not all the way through.

I put this horrifying notion out of my mind as quickly as possible, deciding that I’d surely read dozens of books this year but that their content had been drowned out by the barrage of media I’m forced to consume for my job.

Besides, I write books, so of course I read them. My house is crammed with books, so much so that they’ve exhausted the shelves and migrated to the bedroom floor and even the kitchen, where they collect grease stains and, like the baking pans I also neither use nor have figured out how to store properly, taunt me with daily reminders of my failure to lead a full, rich life (the kind in which you read books and bake -- ideally Proust in the original French and puff pastry made from scratch).

But as is painfully clear, owning books isn’t the same as reading them. And by the time I received the second e-mail, I was so afraid of blowing the lid off my benightedness, I actually grabbed the nearest novel and started reading, in the hope that, to quote the magazine editor, it would “delight, surprise or move” me enough to recommend it.

As it happened, it was a book I had already read. I’d reviewed it -- not particularly favorably -- and the reason it was close at hand was because the publication for which I’d reviewed it had sent me the newly published hardcover, a customary treat because reviewing books pays about as much as manicuring the nails of pets, and not necessarily all four paws.

I was greatly relieved. See, I had read books published in 2006! I’d even finished some of them. They just didn’t fall strictly into the “pleasure” category. Instead, I’d read them to review, or for blurbing or, in most cases, to incorporate an aspect of them into this column or some other writing assignment. I’d also, come to think of it, read a great many unpublished manuscripts by friends, students and, in an act of grave misjudgment, someone I was seated next to on an airplane (it was a long flight, though not as long as it felt).

But none of that meant I could lay claim to having a favorite book of 2006.

This made me even more depressed than I’d been when I thought I hadn’t read anything. UNESCO, which monitors the number of books published per country per year, reports that 172,000 titles came out in the U.S. in 2005. (Britain had 206,000.)

Assuming the number will be similar this year, you’d think I could find one that delighted, surprised and moved me. It’s kind of like being a judge at the Miss America Pageant and not picking a winner because you were too busy reading Google News to look up.

The dirty secret of my literary life is that, despite what you might like to think, it in no way resembles a graceful pendulum swinging between enraptured reading and ecstatic scribbling. I’m just as overwhelmed by excess information as everyone else -- and that includes most other writers, I suspect. Even those of us who produce nonrequired reading don’t necessarily have time to partake of it.

I know this doesn’t quite square with the book club craze and the fact that publishers are releasing more titles than ever. I know that we all technically read constantly -- text messages, the crawl on CNN, descriptions of glass doorknobs on EBay. But I also know that that doesn’t really count. The number of those of us willing (or even able) to consume more than a computer screen’s worth of text at a time has to be diminishing by the day.

My eyes passed over millions of words this year. That, I’m afraid, is precisely why I read so little. I hate to sound stodgy, but once you realize that, for instance, you’re spending far more time reading about interesting books than actually partaking of them, you have to wonder about the net benefit of the “information boom,” connectivity and a whole lot of other breakthroughs that let us pretend we know more, see more and read more than ever.

What good is our ability to take in information when the quantity becomes so overwhelming that we can’t parse out quality even if we try? How do we define literacy when being ill-read isn’t a symptom of failing to read but of reading too much of the wrong things?

Surely the answers are out there. They just take more than a screen or two to explicate. Talk about a well-kept secret.

mdaum@latimescolumnists.com