And yet I still buy and hoard books. I’ve joked–joked–that I’ll have to quit my job as a book reviewer in order to read books. But given that I won’t, I imagine I’ll spend my first months of retirement doing math, dividing the number of pages per day I can read into the number of years I think I have left–and weeding my thousands of books to read accordingly.Jesus, I hadn't even thought about doing that math. I need to get on this.
But it's mildly reassuring to remember that I'm not alone, b/c we all have more books to read than we ever will read. And we all let books sit for far too long. I think I might be unusual in that I am more likely to use the "But I will like it so much I just want to save it for a little longer" excuse. But in the end, it is still an excuse. And one that gives me time for re-reading Emma and watching deliciously bad teen shows.
2 comments:
I've been pretty ruthless in tackling the to-be-read pile. A decade ago, I had roughly 35 shelf feet of unread books. That is down to about 15 feet now. One of my rules is that I can only buy new books once I've cleared off another shelf in the to-be-read bookcase. I hadn't considered the mathematics of it in terms of pages per year. Given that a not insignificant part of what's on the to-be-read shelves is what I would call very hard reading (mathematics text books, foreign language learning), it will be quite a challenge to clear that last fifteen feet in the 40-60 years I have left on earth.
I have never gathered all my unread books together in one place in order to consider shelf feet. The idea sounds terrifying. In general, I think I would be better off if I could give up reading The New Yorker. But it's just not a sacrifice I'm willing to make :)
Post a Comment