I never thought about what books I’d want with me on a desert island until I found myself on one when I moved to New Zealand last year.

Only kidding. Technically, New Zealand is two desert islands separated by a narrow strait.

But the point is, as my wife and I prepared to pick up shop from New York to her native Auckland, we had some reckoning to do. With a fixed budget, how do you decide what books are worth the cost in freight to ship overseas?

The selection process made me want to puke. It triggered an anxiety I usually associate with “top-ten” lists, where the prospect of having not read someone’s favorite title indicated an essential deficit to my education, taste or intellect.

Like when the New York Times published its top-25 list of “best” American fiction from the previous quarter century, I remember ticking off the titles I’d owned or read (Independence Day by Richard Ford? Yeeaah, boy) while castigating myself over those that I’d missed (Housekeeping by Marilynne Robinson, what moron could have missed that?)

But why should I care what fiction the Times decided was “best”? What programmatic cross section of the reading population in America was I desperate to affiliate myself with, anyway?

I don’t know. But because I sometimes think that way, I began to wonder about the value I placed on my books and why I owned any of them in the first place.

Did I really like The Savage Detectives? Or did I think I did because some abstract authority or institution or strategic placement in Barnes and Noble made me believe I should? Did I prominently display my copy on the off-chance that a dipshit like myself would come to my apartment, browse the shelves and say, “Hey, you read Roberto Bolano just like me. High five.”

Uh…maybe.

Anyway, we decided. We packed some of our books, and the rest we sold or placed in small piles on the stoop in front of our apartment day after day. Each pile disappeared immediately and sometimes strangers would stop us on the street and ask when there’d be more.

By the time we finally got to New Zealand, I’d forgotten what books we’d packed. It was good enough just to have these familiar, tangible objects from back home regardless of whether my rationale for owning them was “pure” or from vanity or just some inexplicable neurosis.

There was my 16 year old copy of The Odyssey, for example, one of the few fictional works of length that I’ve read more than twice, which I must have brought over because I could never figure why Penelope never filed for divorce.

Then there was A Distant Mirror, Barbara Tuchman’s amazing history of the “calamitous 14^th century” with its endless war and incredible gap between the noblemen and the serfs, I guess because sometimes it’s nice to see how far humanity has progressed. I bought that book 12 years ago, when I needed stimulation living alone in a sleepy upstate New York village and the local hoodlums wouldn’t sell me pot.

Then there was Being and Time by Martin Heidegger, because sometimes one of the legs on your dining room table is six inches shorter than the other three.

Then there was the bulk of the Aubrey-Maturin Series by Patrick O’Brian, because my grandmother is such a fan and she gave them to me and I’ve only read the first three volumes so far and I’m afraid that if I don’t read the rest she’ll pull my ears.

There was also A Form/Of Taking/It All by Rosmarie Waldrop because I had so much fun in Shelley Jackson’s class at New School, and Castle to Castle because I had an interesting argument about reality in Ben Taylor’s, and I want to feel like my MFA was worth the price.

And there was my ancient copy of The Soft Machine collaged over by my friend from art school who broke my heart, and the collection of essays by Murray Kempton from the friend whose heart I broke, and a ragged old Blood Meridian from a friend who is still my friend and missed.

And there was The Metamorphoses because you can’t make that shit up, and a volume of the Gnostic Gospels because what else am I going to read in the toilet?

And there was Watt because it once belonged to my late father and I wondered if he’d ever read it himself, and besides, what is funnier than Watt? And Sixty Stories, because what is funnier than Sixty Stories? And a history of the Battle of Brooklyn because that was what I was reading in the Brooklyn pub where I first befriended my wife 225 years after George Washington retreated to a sleepy village upstate where none of the hoodlums would sell him hemp.

And then, at last, there was Francine Prose’s Reading Like a Writer, because one of these days her list of books “to be read immediately” won’t make me feel so anxious anymore.

It’s one of the most dreaded scenarios that you can ever encounter.  You’re at some social function, a birthday dinner or a cocktail party, and everyone you meet is, well…smarter than you.  It isn’t like you’re an idiot or anything; you just want to have a conversation about the latest episode of Jersey Shore and all everyone wants to talk about is J.D. Salinger (who just died or something) and keeps mentioning Catcher in the Rye.  And you think baseball is boring, so you never read it and everyone gives you looks of pity and disgust.  Thankfully, with these helpful rules and advice, you’ll never have to suffer through such an experience ever again.  You’ll know how to act well read.

You don’t have to actually read the books, just about them.

Reading books takes time and concentration, and you have neither.  You can look up the plots to classic titles on Wikipedia, flip through the New York Times Book Review to learn about the latest releases, and cruise through bookstores every now and then to read the backs of random books.  This will give you just enough material to work with in conversation; you’ll be able to list main characters and themes along with the settings and main plot points or two.  Oh, and NEVER use the movie version of a book as the source of reference—Hollywood changes everything, including endings.

Be part of the conversation.

People who don’t know what’s being talked about don’t participate in the conversation.  Think about when you were a little kid and your parents talked about politics or world events over dinner—you didn’t add to the discussion because you knew nothing about it.  This is also the riskiest part of pretending to be well read.  You’re in danger of exposing yourself as not knowing what the hell you’re talking about, because…well, you don’t.  Hopefully, if you followed the previously mentioned step, you’ll have enough to work with.  The rest of these rules will help you survive the discussion.

Never admit to not knowing an author.

So, you’ve waded into the conversation and, despite your research, someone mentions a writer you’ve never heard before.  Don’t ask, “Who’s that?”  It does seem a little obvious, but even those that actually read a lot break this rule.  Remain passive when a novelist you’re not familiar with is being praised (Though a nod every now and then along with an affirmation of “Yeah, he’s good,” doesn’t hurt.) And if asked directly whether you’ve read a specific title of his work, respond with “I’ve only read his short fiction.”

Agree with whoever actually read the book and don’t ask questions.

“I pretended to read many books back in college,” my friend Jane admits, “but I definitely don’t remember how I pulled it off other than agreeing with the individuals and laughing when they were saying, ‘and do you remember the crazy part when so and so did this and that?’”  It goes without saying that if someone is recounting what happened in a book you haven’t read, you should just go along with what they’re saying. But there is the temptation to take it too far and expose yourself with just one little logical assumption (that turns out to be false) or too much praise.  Something a book publicist friend (who wishes to remain anonymous, for obvious reasons) found out the hard way. “I told the author I was so glad his book had a happy ending,” she says, “and he replied, ‘The main character gets shoved through a woodcutter.’ Whoops.”  Which brings us to out final rule…

Stick to what you know for sure.

So you’ve done your research, joined the conversation, haven’t admitted to not knowing any writer-y names thrown around, and are agreeing with everything being said—and it’s working.  You may feel like the greatest con artist the world has ever known and cocky enough to try and make something up—DON’T.  It’s a classic mistake; just stick to what you know.   “When talking about books I try to stick to books that are based on real events,” explains my friend Sean.  “Especially events in which I know how they worked out, i.e. the Titanic, civil war, you get the picture.  This way I can talk about the book by talking about what happened.”

Using my system, you’ll be able to navigate any conversation with a bibliophile with the greatest of ease.  Now, some critics may argue that truly being a “well read” person is not about the amount of reading you’ve done, but more about being open to discovering new books and writers.  They’ll even go so far as to say that discussions about books shouldn’t be to “prove” what you’ve read, but rather what you haven’t. They’ll say that you have to rise above your ego and freely admit what you don’t know, so as to discover and share books and authors that can change lives.

But what do those people know? They don’t even know who Snooki is.

One of the things I’m reading right now is The Habit of Being, the collected volume of Flannery O’Connor letters edited by Sally Fitzgerald.

In a January, 1949 letter to her agent, Elizabeth McKee, O’Connor  notes that “James Ross, a writer who is here [at Yaddo], is looking for an agent.  He wrote a very fine book called, They Don’t Dance Much.  It didn’t sell much.  If you are interested in him, I daresay he would be glad to hear form you.  Right now he wants to sell some stories he is reworking.”  Don’t we all.

For much of 1949, O’Connor was in conflict with Rinehart over Wise Blood. We all know who she became in the years to follow, but They Don’t Dance Much (originally published by Houghton Mifflin in 1940), like Ross, seems to have only grown in obscurity.  Obscure might not quite equal lost, but by 1975, Southern Illinois University dubbed They Don’t Dance Much lost enough for reprint in their Lost American Fiction series.  This book is also mentioned by Raymond Chandler in in his collected letters, and the (count them!) three reviews on Amazon are overwhelmingly positive.

Since before my time in Divinity School, I’ve been fascinated by the idea of lost texts, missing sources, and phantom documents.  Things we only know about because they’re quoted or listed in still-extant works.  They Don’t Dance Much feels like one of those pieces, so when I found out that it actually exists, I ordered it.  I’ll review it here in the coming weeks.

It took Ross 35 years to go from obscure to lost and back.  What books first published in 1975 have a similar story now, 35 years hence, and deserve another look?

The man responsible for sparking my interest in both reading and writing, Jerome David Salinger, has died. BBC News is reporting that he “died of natural causes, his son said in a statement released by his literary agent.”

I’m sure I’m not alone in wondering what kind of craziness is going to ensue from this. If you remember, Salinger hasn’t published anything since the 60s. But that doesn’t mean he had stopped writing. With the dubious stuff his children have done in the past (“Dream Catcher,” anyone?), I’m sure we’re going to see the floodgates open up and a deluge of previously unpublished work come out. Think of all the money a lot of people stand to make off this sad news.

For now, though, as we wait to see what happens next… check out my previous feature about my own personal Salinger Library including links to places on the internet where you can read his entire (published and uncollected) oeuvre.

I have a confession to make, and I hope the editors of _______ Review and _____ Quarterly are not listening.

I, holder of an MFA in creative writing, aspiring writer and former fiction editor of a well-respected literary journal, do not subscribe to a single literary magazine.

Yesterday, I submitted several of my short stories to 35 literary magazines across a broad spectrum of prestige, from The Paris Review to the We’ll Publish Your Adolescent Diary Review. Ten of my submissions were sent electronically and 25 were submitted via hard copy in the mail, which, considering I am no longer near my former university’s computer lab and do not currently own a printer, cost me as much as at least one night out at the bar (if I did that sort of thing). This process is one I will engage in a few times a year until I am 99 and become a famous writer and editors actually start soliciting my work.

It’s a little depressing, therefore, to realize that most of the magazines I am submitting to are not even read by my friends, even my writerly friends, on a regular basis. If I am accepted by one of these publications, I expect that a few of my friends will buy a copy as some sort of memento, but that’s about it.

I know I should also feel guilty for not avidly reading the magazines I’m submitting to, but in truth, I am probably more familiar with these magazines than the average person who submits. During my former tenure with a literary magazine, I was able to peruse our “lit mag library” and read new issues of most of these magazines for free; if I hadn’t had that opportunity, I probably wouldn’t know what most of them even look  like.  But even though I took many issues home, I rarely read one cover to cover; I read names I’d heard of and stories or poems that grabbed me on the first line. Even my flexible graduate student schedule did not allow me to read much more than that.

Editors are well aware of the gap between the number of people submitting and the number subscribing—and you can tell they are (rightly) annoyed by it. During my recent frenzied submission process, I noticed that most literary magazines print the following sort of phrase in their guidelines for submission:

“Before you submit, we encourage you to read one of our issues to familiarize yourself with the kind of work we publish.”

This phrase is the lit mag equivalent of the “Deaf Child Area” sign; for all you know, the deaf child is an old man by now or moved away with his family 10 years ago. It’s one of those pleas you probably won’t listen to, a plea for you to slow down and please spend 12 dollars on the magazine before it folds and finds itself buried in the lit mag graveyard next to Story, New American Review, and, the most recently deceased classic, TriQuarterly. There are many other casualties, of course, but those three heavyweights published the likes of Philip Roth, Charles Baxter, Amy Hempel, John Cheever, J.D. Salinger, Tennessee Williams, Tom Robbins, Susan Sontag, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Donald Barthelme, Grace Paley—before they were famous. Where is that magazine now, the one that every young writer subscribes to for the newest, freshest, we-have-our-ear-to-the-ground thing?

The truth is, the only magazine most of my literary friends subscribe to is The New Yorker. For the $30 professional rate, you get an issue almost every week, each which includes a story and a few poems, whereas a subscription to Ninth Letter, which includes two issues a year, is $21.95. Is it worth every penny? Probably. But how many of us can afford that at the moment?

In truth, I think it’s terrible that MFA programs, which are churning out hundreds of aspiring writers, are not producing avid readers and consumers of literature. What’s even worse is that non-writers do not buy these magazines either and most people have not even heard of one besides The Paris Review. A few months ago, I was lucky enough to have a short story accepted by a very good literary magazine, and it was a real run down the street with your fist pumping, maybe feel like your debt was worth it experience. But most of my non-writer friends have no idea that this magazine with the silly-sounding name is actually a pretty big deal. In fact, getting in almost any print literary magazine is a big deal. I don’t know the rate of acceptance for the most esteemed literary magazines, but I know that the one I worked on rejected a few hundred stories for every one it took. You should feel proud to be a part of any one of them; thousands of people want to get in and never will.

These magazines are important and they are struggling and I encourage all of us to try to subscribe to at least a few. But I don’t think it’s entirely our fault for not doing so. As I illustrated above, many of them are prohibitively expensive. You can subscribe to Harper’s for around $17, which includes 12 issues; a subscription to Crazyhorse, one of my favorite lit mags, is $16 and includes two issues. Most of the editors of these magazines work for little or free, so I understand the cost. I just worked on an arts and culture magazine that we are trying to sell for $10 an issue, though I hope we can find advertisers and eventually bring the cost down. I just can’t personally afford to buy very many of these magazines, and neither can most of my friends. This is why I pick up Poetry magazine fairly often even though I’m not a poet—it’s under $5, it’s high quality, and it fits really well into my purse.

Furthermore, even if I could afford to subscribe to all the magazines I submit to, who realistically has time to read all of them? Ideally, I would divide my reading time as follows: ¼ classic fiction, ¼ new literature, ¼ literary magazines, ¼ poetry, drama, and essays. If I was a kept woman, one week might consist of the following possible reading: one copy of Gulf Coast magazine, one Dostoevsky, the Lynda Hull I’ve been carrying around for a month but haven’t finished, and maybe one of the new books of fiction by Dave Eggers or Tracy Kidder, both of which I’d like to read but may never get to. Since I have to work for living, it might take me a month to read these four publications, and guess what? The literary magazine is the first to go when I run out of time.

One last possible reason for my lack of commitment to these magazines is that I garner much more satisfaction from reading an entire collection by one author than a bunch of different stories by various writers. I like to let a writer’s voice and prose style really soak in; moving from one writer to the next in the course of a half-hour is jarring. When I do buy a literary magazine, I read it little by little, consuming it a piece at a time like the dark chocolate bar in my freezer. Maybe I let it last a little too long.

We all know these magazines are expensive and their cover art is sometimes bad and there are too many to keep track of. But their importance  cannot be underestimated. They are the only way for a new writer to have her work seen, if only by a few hundred eyes. They nurture a community of passionate writers like myself who are in it for the right reasons. That’s why I feel so guilty. As creative writing programs continue to proliferate, there is no doubt that these magazines will see an abundance of submissions in the upcoming years. But without adequate readership and funding, who knows how many of these magazines will even be around to reject our submissions a decade from now.