When you discover and suggest a new book every day it never really affects you until at the end of the month when you gather all those suggested books together and realize that you want to read so many of them and that you probably never will. As I sit here with hundreds of books surrounding me on my new white bookshelves and thousands of books silently buzzing in my miracle digital readers, I am realizing more and more the horrific truth in that Arthur Schopenhauer quotation:
To buy books would be a good thing if we also could buy the time to read them.
Every day when I add yet another title to my list of suggested reading, I imagine that I am seated at a rustic desk with an antique banker’s lamp casting a yellow glow over the pages of the book I am currently reading, and casting a long shadow across the floor imaging the unending stack of suggested reading teetering on the outside corner of my desk.
Do you suppose the world will ever run out of books to read?
When you realize that I probably ignore nine out of ten new book titles I run across during the month, it’s still amazing that I can limit these suggestions to one-a-day. Add to that all the books I already have on my new bookshelves and I can hear the blind fury coming down the stairs looking to snip my aging thread before I can even make a dent in all this desirable reading.