The War Within

It's confession day at LN VS. ML.

I've been keeping a computerized list of books I've read since late 2001 (actually the weekend I visited a certain school while reading THIS SIDE OF PARADISE for the first time). If you saw the list you would only be able to conclude that I'm crazy, because it has all kinds of signs and color codes and I can sort it by author or by date. Because while I am a 21-year-old college student, I am also apparently the 40-year-old virgin with a copy of Excel in lieu of a lot of action figures.

Last year was the first complete year in which I kept track of all the movies I watched. I had compiled a list in the fall of 2004 while I was taking a Spanish film class and wanted to remember all the movies we watched for my friends not in the class who also loved Almodovar. Then I went abroad, and my library in Madrid had a pretty decent collection of recent Spanish movies, so I figured I'd use it to keep track of my weekly rentals. A lot of the movies I saw in theatres in the first six months of last year haven't even come out yet in the states ("Reinas", for example, which the blue states are just going to love because it's like "Love, Actually" but with a mass gay marriage, and features a number of hot actresses over 40 as the mothers of the affianced) so it was useful to keep track of them. I kept up the habit when I got home because it was blockbuster season (not that I saw most of the blockbusters, but that's neither here nor there).

Then I counted up at the end of the year and saw I had more movies than books on my lists (just barely more!).

I guess it's not that hard to understand. It can take a lot longer to finish a book than a movie, depending on the book (and the movie?), and sometimes watching movies is preferable (like when I'm trying to do something else). But I feel like I'm giving up if I let the books not matter as much to me, because I was very much a books-first teenager (I probably didn't see more than 5 movies a year in theatres until I started driving). But assuming I can't read and watch movies at the same time -- well, I can do class reading, anything that's meant to be skimmed anyway -- I can only do one of them, and I have library books but I also have Netflix.

All this blather means I should probably stop keeping lists if I'm going to look at them every day and obsess over them. But I'm thinking about cutting back on my Netflix account. My stack of books I want to read is piling up faster than movies I want to watch, and there's really no substitute for a good book.