On Reading the OED (in a year)

Whenever I feel that I am, perhaps, taking on too much (getting the ropes of my new novel entangled with the skeins of the last one; pounding at client white papers on the sort of obscure topics that render me useless at social functions; hurrying, seemingly heartlessly, past a garden that has yielded so much joy and only now, only quietly, calls out for a weed-invasion intervention), I stop and take a look at what the rest of the world is doing.

Whatever I, for example, have mercilessly (and, I tell myself, preposterously) tried to squeeze into a day pales—oh, so absolutely—with the self-imposed task taken on by one Ammon Shea, who decided to read the OED in, hmmm, a single year's time. That's 59 million words, according to Nicholson Baker's review in the New York Times. 59 million words, all with their own proud pedigrees, all sitting there one on top of the other, in 20 separate volumes.

Now that's ambition, if you ask me. That's dedication. That's a calling. That's, well, I don't know the word precisely, but Mr. Shea would have to. Mr. Shea now knows every word, and frankly, I am jealous. We write entire books to discover the few things we mean to say. We throw bridges out from ourselves to others: approximating, hoping.

So here's to Mr. Shea and his 20-volume set. Here's to Beth, who, ten books later and an embarrassing number of bad drafts under the expanding belt of very bad drafts (my, the first drafts are horrific; my, they are), is still hunting for that killer phrase, a word or two by which to be remembered.

A word or two to speak through.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/03/books/review/Baker-t.html?ref=books