The Perpetual Motion Reading Machine

Posted 18 October, 2007 in Bookish |

Several stacks of books surround the desk in my office and cover every available inch of surface space. There’s the Giller shortlist pile, which stares back at me balefully each morning, the heavy tomes practically vibrating with a sonorous hum. This pile is the result of a rash and unconsidered promise your humble correspondent made a week or so ago, which is seeming more and more ill-conceived as every day goes by.* There is the pile of books for review, which at the moment is mercifully manageable.

Then there is the to-read pile. Actually, there are two stacks of to-read books, broken down roughly by date of acquisition. The pile that contains Michael Chabon’s novel The Yiddish Policeman’s Union and Leonard Michaels’s Collected Stories has been shifted behind a pile of newer books, including Claire Messud’s The Emperor’s Children and the paperback edition of Thomas L. Friedman’s The World Is Flat. These will likely be supplanted in coming days by newer books that are acquired at bookstores, through friends, industry contacts, and so on.

The plain fact is, I will never conquer the to-read pile. It’s a simple matter of physics. Too many (far too many) interesting books are published in a given season, there are only twenty-four hours in each day, and there’s only one of me (until I perfect that cloning device I’ve been working on in the back shed). Plus, I have an unquenchable acquisitiveness when it comes to new books: like a siren’s call, I am almost physically unable to walk past a bookstore without going in, and once inside, I’m unable to leave empty-handed. This causes an exhaustive drain on my already depleted bank account, but it also results in a kind of literary perpetual motion machine. I come home from each visit to the bookstore with a new volume (or, more frequently, volumes), which are then lovingly added to the pile in my office.

Unfortunately, space considerations being what they are (another law of physics being that you can’t cram more into a given space than the available space is able to hold), the addition of the new books to the pile means that the older books get shuffled over to the back. Eventually, these older books, which once had pride of place at the top of the to-read pile, will need to move off the floor to make room in the office, at which point they will be consigned to shelves. Once they’re placed unread on the shelves, the chances of my ever getting to them are reduced to about nil.

As I’m writing this, the shelves in my office are bulging with a group of politics and international relations volumes I purchased earlier this year. Noam Chomsky’s Failed States, Kevin Phillips’s American Theocracy, George Packer’s The Assassin’s Gate, Linda McQuaig’s Holding the Bully’s Coat. All of these once sat, shiny and new and inviting, at the top of the to-read pile. Now they wait in vain for a spare weekend that will probably never come.

This is the curse that inveterate booklovers suffer. I once read somewhere (I can’t remember off the top of my head where) that a booklover can immediately identify a non-booklover because the first question the latter will ask when gazing at the booklover’s shelves is, “Have you read all of these?” The obvious answer, of course, being no.

And yet the to-read pile continues to grow and mutate like a living organism. Perhaps one day I’ll find the right balance between setting reasonable goals for what can be read as against impulsively purchasing everything that catches my eye at any given time and deluding myself that I can get to it all by giving up television or by sleeping a couple of hours less each night. (After all, I’ve heard that one can be driven insane by attempting something that one knows at the outset to be impossible.) More likely, though, the to-read pile will continue to grow and change, like a snake shedding its skin every three or four months. There’s a kind of comfort in knowing that if I’m ever stuck for something to read ( ! ), I can always turn to my shelves, where books I’ve forgotten even acquiring sit waiting to be rediscovered, as though they were new.

*As I told one interlocutor about this promise: no, I was completely sober when I issued it, which makes it that much worse.

2 comments to “The Perpetual Motion Reading Machine”

Alex, October 18th, 2007 at 1:28 pm:

• I made the same deal to read the Giller shortlist this year and review them. And I did it last year too! So suck it up! So many tempting titles, it’s hard to know where to begin . . .

Panic, October 18th, 2007 at 1:32 pm:

• Really, don’t bother with The Emperor’s Children. Unless you enjoy reading about the oh so difficult lives of the over-privileged, and their sniveling. Terrible book. I threw it across the room at some point.

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