Am I alone in having the best intentions to read but always having far too many books waiting to be read and not enough time?

My Folio Sherlock Homes is around 5 years old and I have only read one volume. I fancy the Blandings box set for my renewal but don't want it to crumble to dust before I get to it. If I read only Folio volumes I would have little time to read anything else. So many books so little time - am I alone in this?

Not at all ... but I could never stop buying them ... when not reading them, I look at them on the shelves. I like to think of books as a literary savings account: just storing them up for hard times. I do have nightmares about the books that I might never get to read ....

You are certainly not alone! I, too, have shelves of "to-be-read" volumes. Around 200 at last count. Which may seem a bit much, but I have to say, when I was laid up for nearly three weeks last winter, I was very glad to have those books at my fingertips!

#3, see, a literary savings account! I was mighty glad that I had one when I spent a few years living abroad where English language texts were hard to come by. You can never have too many unread books ;-)

I don't know what's wrong with me: I have only a few Folio volumes but about five hundred books all together. I've only been collecting for ten years. I've read most of what I've got but keep buying more all the time, so I never get caught up. What I notice most often is the comfort they give me. I feel better just being in the room with them.

Is that nuts or what?

I have to say nearly every book I own I haven't read. I joined a book swapping site when I lived in Germany and I swapped hundreds of books through it (it was a really fantastic idea and, typically German, it was much better organised than anything I found when I returned to Ol Blighty). But the net result - alongside all my new Folios - is shelf upon shelf of unread books. >3 I guess I'm up around 200+ too. Scary.

I have been doing a decent job of keeping up with the new arrivals but the Blandings and Campaigns of Wellington box sets currently in the mail will no doubt change that quite rapidly.

A 3 year old and a nine month old will ensure it.

>5 "What I notice most often is the comfort they give me. I feel better just being in the room with them."

When I was a child, I used to look up at the shelves of my father's books and get a warm glow just thinking of the accumulated wisdom of the generations stored within them. I know by rights one ought to get a similar if not a much stronger feeling from gazing at the computer connected to the internet, but it doesn't work if you can't see something physical. When that physical entity is a well-made book, containing a great novel or a brilliant work of scholarship, with good, fragrant paper, black type, beautiful and apposite illustrations that the artist has laboured over with a passion for his subject, it makes you realise how lucky you are to be able to appreciate it. To sit in a well-planned library and contemplate hundreds or thousands of them is heaven indeed. In other words, there is a great deal of enjoyment to be had merely in anticipation. The danger, of course, is, having read, to be disappointed. Which is probably why Sydney Smith said, "I never read a book before reviewing it, it prejudices a man so."

To come back down to earth, I too have many books which I've never quite got round to reading yet. I tell myself that I only buy books I want to read, which is only sensible, but at the moment a lot of my time is taken up with cataloguing them, trying to fit new ones on shelves that are already full, and keeping up with the 'Folio Society devotees'. I console myself with the thought that when I retire, I'll have more time. Then I remember I am retired.

Well, I've noticed that, since I started keeping an estimate about 10-15 yrs ago, the number of books I intend to read has always been about the same ballpark as the number of books I have read (and I keep virtually every book I read). So, I think that means I pretty consistently acquire two books (total) for every one I read.

Here are my current stats:
Read - 524
To Read - 677

Of course, this doesn't include books acquired simply as references or for historical interest (facsimiles in a language I can't read, for example). And there's the 207 books on my list to read again!

When I started keeping a list in a spreadsheet, I had about 10 years of reading on my list. I read more books in a year now than I did then, and my list is now 12.7 yrs long.

But, the time will come when I may not be able to pickup a copy of whatever catches my fancey, and I'll be glad I have such a backlog. And, as long as I buy books printed on quality, pH neutral paper, with decent bindings, and do a reasonable job of taking care of them they'll wait for me (at least until the fire or flood).

Os.

I went to an antiquarian book show yesterday, and I couldn't help noticing there were fewer booksellers than last year... and practically all of the sellers are older people--not middle aged, even older, with maybe half looking around sixty-seventy plus... and a lot of the buyers were older too... I've seen so many bookstores close in the past 15 years, but I never felt like I was watching the passing of the paper book trade before.

I was telling a friend that perhaps secondhand stores like hers are more likely to survive if paper books become scarce on the primary market--at least until the last paper book on earth falls apart. Then again, she refuses to sell online, and the foot traffic may not suffice when almost everyone thinks they can find a better bargain somewhere in the cyberspace, or don't even realise there's a bookstore around the corner.

Why I mention this--I was always terrible at resisting temptation (like Wilde!), but now I'm feeling almost an urgency to buy anything I fancy, because books may disappear! I already cannot count on going to any part of this big city and running into one bookstore, let alone a few. And buying on the internet, while it's clearly becoming more of a necessity, will never be as satisfying as shopping "in person". Moreover, if we have to turn to the internet even for the secondhand fare, that means more exposure to possible disappointments about the book's condition etc.

It's quite possible--probable even-- that I would have amassed some 3K unread books even without the paper book crisis, but now I certainly have a great justification in doing so. :)

I have this funny feeling -- surely the Lord won't call me home until I've read (or at least have had a decent opportunity to read) all my books. So far, he hasn't. So if I keep buying books and not reading them...

Courtesy of Nicholas Taleb's The Black Swan:
"The writer Umberto Eco belongs to that small class of scholars who are encyclopedic, insightful, and non dull. He is the owner of a large personal library (containing thirty thousand books), and separates visitors into two categories: those who react with 'Wow! Signore professore dottore Eco, what a library you have! How many of these books have you read?' and the others - a very small minority - who get the point that a private library is not an ego-boosting appendage but a research tool. Read books are far less valuable than unread ones. The library should contain as much of what you do not know as your financial means, mortgage rates, and the currently tight read-estate market allows you to put there. You will accumulate more knowledge and more books as you grow older, and the growing number of unread books on the shelves will look at you menacingly. Indeed, the more you know, the larger the rows of unread books. Let us call this collection of unread books an antilibrary."

Someone once said that Remembrance of Things Past was a book that one must read before dying, so he was keeping it as insurance. I have many, many insurance policies.

I have used the "antilibrary" concept to those deluded friends of mine who are not book collectors. I find it to be an excellent phrase and it keeps me stable when it comes to book purchases.

> 5 "What I notice most often is the comfort they give me. I feel better just being in the room with them."

I wholeheartedly agree. Just seeing the books on the shelf and knowing that SOMEDAY I will read them makes me happy. In fact, there are some books I am almost afraid to read because then I won't be able to anticipate reading them.

I totally agree with the sentiments expressed here - just knowing that I have a library of unread books gives me tremendous satisfaction. I love to browse through them.

I have about 1,500 books. Approx 40% have been read. The "to be read" pile grows larger every day.

I recall a new, good feeling about my library popped up when I started to find in my library other written works either: 1)mentioned in the book I was reading, allowing me to pull the cited book off my shelf and see/read what the author was citing, or 2) historical events alluded to which are covered in other works on my shelf, allowing me to 'read around' the events in the book I am reading.

Those unread books began to be a reference library for my reading. As my library has grown, the frequency of this happening has increased. A very satisfying experience.

Os.

PS - I also get a warm rush whenever I walk past my 'wall of books', especially if a book on my to-read list catches my eye.

>5 "I feel better just being in the room with them.
Is that nuts or what?"

Not nuts at all, I hope!
I cannot help but agree with the sentiments expressed here.
Just wish I could get in the room where my books are ;-)

MJ

>17 "I recall a new, good feeling about my library popped up when I started to find in my library other written works either: 1)mentioned in the book I was reading, allowing me to pull the cited book off my shelf and see/read what the author was citing, or 2) historical events alluded to which are covered in other works on my shelf, allowing me to 'read around' the events in the book I am reading."

Yes, indeed, this is when your library starts working for you. Suddenly, it's almost organic. The books you have start to dictate the books you want. The satisfaction in being able to read around a subject is immense.

jburlinson -- message 11 -- You may end up as a bibliomanic Dunbar. Dunbar, you may recall, was the character in Catch 22 who was fearful of being killed and wanted to live as long as possible. And we all know that "time flies when you're having fun," so Dunbar cultivated boredom. He did things like watch paint dry, play solitaire with 51 cards, etc. The idea was to live longer by making time pass slowly.

So you're going to live longer by buying books you don't read. That's a new approach, a new solution to Dunbar's problem. Maybe you just thought up a plot for your very first novel.

NO! Don't do that! If not reading books prolongs your life, not writing books might kill you.

Think about it.

Or not.

As for the idea that we approach "the end of the paper book" -- I was stumbling around looking for the publishing history of Thomas Paine's "Common Sense." I was snooping in Wikipedia. I found a reference to Moncure Daniel Conway's "THE LIFE OF THOMAS PAINE: WITH A HISTORY OF HIS LITERARY, POLITICAL AND RELIGIOUS CAREER IN AMERICA, FRANCE, AND ENGLAND," which was published in two volumes by G.P. Putnam's Sons in 1893. So I went over to ABE Books and tried a search. I found the item is neither rare nor is it expensive. And for $25 (or thereabouts) I can get BRAND NEW, hardback copies of both volumes from one of these "publish on demand" outfits.

So what I'm driving at is the idea that paper books aren't about to disappear: they're about to be born again. As more and more of these "publish on demand" outfits vie for our business, we're going to see works like those of Moncure D. Conway become available once again IN FACSIMILE EDITIONS that precisely ape the appearance and format of the original publication. Obviously I cannot speak for the rest of the world but I WILL BUY THOSE BOOKS when I find them available at a price I can afford.

I think that what most reasonable people mean by "The End of The Book" is that books risk becoming a minority hobby. People like us, dedicated to reading actual paper pages, would then be like the people who collect hat pins, oil lamps and other once commonplace items, or try to live like romans during weekends.

Or perhaps book readers are like people who appreciate other 'ancient' forms of communication, such as live concerts, theatre, poetry recitals and oil paintings. Just because a new technology exists, it does not condemn older ones to disappear. Many of the oldest forms of communication remain the most meaningful (dance, painting, conversation etc).

Most days I feel that rather than books disappearing, there is a greater risk of books worth reading being drowned by the ever-increasing deluge of bad books. Just go to your local book store and count the cubic meters taken up by Twilight series and celebrity "autobiographies". Compare that to the space given to new books of any intellectual or artistic merit. My ever-increasing pile of TBR is insurance against the day the piles of junk bury everything else like a mud slide :-)

>23
"try to live like romans during weekends"

Would you care to explain what you mean by that?

As for good books being drowned by bad books, cf. Dryden's "Mac Flecknoe," as this has been a concern for over 300 years, and Hawthorne, in a famous letter he might have later regretted writing, complained he couldn't get his own works published as the market was flooded by the productions of "a damned mob of scribbling women."

I agree with dekesolomon that the Publish on Demand printers will satisfy the demand for reprints, but these may not be of the quality Folio Society Devotees want. With the demise of the Heritage Press, no one on this side of the pond seems interested in printing fine, illustrated versions of classic literature--at affordable prices. The LOA is even struggling these days, although their publishing aims are much more modest than the Folio Society's.

Well I have worked out the average length of time a book will remain on my shelf unread, if it hasn't been read in the first 6 months of purchase, is 12 years!

>>10 - ooh, goody, a new 'excuse' for buying books. The Wilde quote is one of my favourites I have to say.

Its interesting what you say LolaW. There do seem to be fewer and fewer good secondhand bookshops around, even noticeable in London. Those I have been going to for years are still run by the same people, many have folded, recently one near the British Museum closed. We are also seeing several of the 'new' bookshops closing at the moment, and are almost exclusively left with Waterstones and WH Smiths in London, as physical places to buy books. Except of course the dearly beloved London Review of Books bookshop.

The internet does make it easier to obtain a particular book if you know what you are looking for, but you are then deprived of the delight of coming upon something you didn't expect or didn't even know existed. There is nothing like a real bookshop for that.

Message edited by its author, Nov 24, 2009, 9:53am.

I can agree with madA63 in message 22 -- When I was at grad school I knew a woman who was working on her PhD in Education. Her dissertation was about some newfangled technique for teaching youngsters to write -- I can't remember what it was called -- but the gist of it was to get each kid to write ten or a dozen pages of SOMETHING (didn't matter what), which would then be bound into a book and -- POOF! -- the kid thinks he knows how to write because (s)he is now a published author. Presumably (s)he will go on to write great American novels and speeches for presentation at Davos next January.

I myself taught remedial composition at a couple of community colleges (not for long, though), and I can tell you there's an awful lot of illiterates in college these days. They download their term papers from the Internet. Teachers all know it and, basically, are being paid to look the other way. If you're willing to water down your own credentials by hanging passing grades on these people, there's room for you as an "adjunct professor of English" at most any community college in the country. The rot is spreading into private schools and major universities. As an experienced technical writer, I can tell you that a great many illiterates are out there writing service manuals today.

I predict the end will come when corporations quit hiring people with American degrees. They've already moved all the jobs overseas. Education will go where the money went in time.

Personally, I blame progressive eduction and its focus on learning "how to learn" instead of important facts in and of themselves. That, along with the utter disappearance of grammar education, has created quite a rot in American education. I found the following recent article insightful, though a rehash of a decades-long debate.

http://city-journal.org/2009/19_4_hirsch...

> 23 There are groups of people who try to recreate various past times as accurately as possible, including Civil War Battles, Jousting and of course Roman Britain. I must state I have nothing against these kind of historical hobbies, and have been known to speak Latin, wear a toga and sip wine from an amphora. But that was simply a phase at University, I was experimenting...

Deluge of bad books: The difference with centuries past is in the sheer volume of publication. Bad books have always been published, and have often seemed to crowd out real art. But people could still read much of what was published and judge for themselves. Now we are at the mercy of critics and publicity.

Not recognizing genius when you see it is another matter, either by being stuck with restrictive criteria or through prejudice. History is full of examples of this.

In my heart I have a fervent hope that history will judge well and sift through the bilge, only keep the good, forget the awful majority and find great authors unknown to us. But I have recurring nightmare in which 21st century literature will consist of the collected works of Paris Hilton and her peers.

As for resilient technology, I must admit that scrolls only have a limited (but culturally significant) use nowadays, and good clay tablets seem to be harder to come by each year.

Full disclosure:

I do like trashy autobiographies, but there has to be an intelligence in the mix. William Hickey or Giacomo Casanova spring to mind. Casanova was even a celebrity in the tabloids of the time.

And I do like vampire books...

Back to the subject of this thread: I find that more and more of my TBR pile is composed of old books. Each one I read suggests more. I'm so often disappointed by new novels and poetry I'm wary about buying them.

I’m so glad frederickmars started this thread. Now I know I’m not the only one who has tons of unread books. My TBR piles were taking over the living room so last weekend I made a list of them and put them in the basement until I can get to them (which at the rate I’m going might be sometime in the next century). Of course it was just the regular books that went into the basement; my Folio books went on the shelves in the living room or bedroom.

As for books becoming a minority hobby, there’s always hope. The CD was supposed to have killed the LP vinyl record but they apparently are making a comeback. Sales of record turntables are picking up and if you search the music section of Amazon for “vinyl” you get 294,000 results. Kindle and computers may be the choice for some when it comes to reading but thanks to Computer Vision Syndrome (which doctors are finally confirming is real and not just eyestrain) might change that. In all the articles I’ve read about CVS they say that our eyes work differently when reading from a computer or other screen (and not in a good way) than they do when you read a book. So people may turn back to books simply as self-defence for their eyes.

With respect to literacy in higher education, there’s probably no hope. My second year in university they started “remedial” courses so students who had graduated high school with university entrance courses could learn to read and write at an acceptable level. Thirty years later all the students take University One which is a more politically correct way to weed out the illiterates. And there are probably a lot of them; according to one newspaper article “Nearly half of Canadian adults don't possess enough literacy skills to understand a public bus schedule, read directions on a pill bottle or keep up with technological advances in the workplace, according to the Canadian Council of Learning”. So if books die it might simply be because there’s nobody left who can read them, not because there's nobody left who wants to read them.

I did as chase.donaldson suggested in message 26. I chased that link and read the hirsch article. It's a good article that (among other things) prompted my memory: The female PhD candidate I mentioned in message 25 was a "whole-language" theorist. Her dissertation on reading instruction espoused whole-language ideals and methods.

The tie-in between my story about that woman and the alleged demise of the paper book is this: she seemed to believe that what one finds between the covers of a book means nothing. All that counts is the form of the book itself. If a child once sees his writing published as a book, (s)he will be inspired to think (s)he is an author and, in thinking so, develop language and reasoning skills that over time will enable him(her) to write other books filled with meaningful content.

At the time I thought her thinking uproariously funny. After my own teaching experience, I no longer found it so. But only now, with self-publishing coming into its own, do I begin to see the full impact of such ideas.

Another factor that contributes to the problem is the disappearance of the professional critic. "Customer reviews" have replaced professional reviews to the extent that -- unless one subscribes to the New York Review of Books or something similar -- one never sees professional reviews at all. Worse: the people who write "customer reviews" are often friends of the author who try to boost sales by saying good things about a book which is in fact a piece of crap. Other would-be critics, not understanding the purpose of a book review, write positive reviews exclusively (believe it or not) on the principle that if one can't think of anything good to say one shouldn't say anything at all.

I tell yuz! When I first encountered that last one I thought the end had truly come. And where we go from there I have no idea other than "down!"

>29 Probably the only way to not have a huge pile of unread books would be to have the discipline to buy one book at a time.

One way of reducing the pile would be an experiment like the one in Howards End is on the Landing: A year of reading from home - spending a year without buying books, and reading only what you already have.

Question:

When do you remove a book from your TBR list? That is, when do you consider it read? I have stacks of books on my TBR list that I have partially read in order to find a specific piece of information, but always promise myself will read cover to cover, when I have the time. What about anthologies or poetry? Do you have to read every piece, or just the main ones? Can you ever consider that you have exhausted a book like The Oxford Book of English Verse 1250-1900?

Do you remove books without reading them, after they have been demolished by someone whose opinion you respect?

-- What? No touchstone for The Oxford Book of English Verse? I had to try again to believe it...

>26

I can't believe someone else saw this article, too! I stumbled onto it two weeks ago and was blown away. Hirsch explains so well what has bothered me for so long about education (what has bothered me since I was a student, really, as the 'progressive style' was coming into fashion as I was in school).

I agree 100% with you Chase, and I encourage everyone to go follow that link.

City-Journal is the only magazine/journal publication that I subscribe to, even above the New England Journal of Medicine which is probably more important given my vocation.
If I may be so bold as to suggest another article from that journal and go off topic a little bit, they did a great one about the architect Le Corbusier this last quarter as well. If you are a hater of the concrete jungle, this is for you.
http://city-journal.org/2009/19_4_otbie-...

I noticed that headline too, though I hadn't read it. On your recommendation, I certainly will!

I found the links to the articles on Arts & Letters Daily, a roundup of intellectual articles published by The Chronicle of Higher Education. City Journal is one of the publications they mine from. Very interesting stuff across all disciplines shows up; I think many in this group might enjoy it. It can be found here:

http://www.aldaily.com/

>32 When do you remove a book from your TBR list?

In general, I have three categories of unread books - TBR, reference (which are never TBR) and the hybrids, which are collection of poetry, music, etc, which are to be dipped into whenever, but aren't generally something you'd sit down and read cover to cover. Only the first should be counted as unread and then checked off when completed. The rest are just there when needed/wanted, and I don't beat myself up about them - they constitute about 1/3 of my library.

Os.

>#35 - I too am an Arts and Letters Daily addict, as are many of my colleagues. I certainly commend it.

>34

Great article, chase, thanks for the link.

>34
Thanks, chase.donaldson, for directing my attention to City-Journal. I plan to subscribe.

Thank you also for the admittedly off-topic link to the very interesting article on Le Corbusier. When he visited North America, he cited the massive grain elevators in the port of Montreal as an example of the architecture of the future. Many of those elevators have since been torn down but the largest remains and I see it every day when I look out my window. Notwithstanding my lack of sympathy for the totalitarian tastes of the great M. Jeanneret, I must confess to a certain perverse affection for this rusting mass of concrete and metal:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/7534049@N05...

>1
It is strange that a person could own hundreds of CD's, or *ahem* old record albums, or even DVD/VHS movies. This is perfectly acceptable with the general response of "I love your ___ collection!

If you have hundreds of BOOKS however, that is somehow excessive. With the look of bewilderment, you get the "have you read all of these?", blah, blah, blah. You then begin to doubt yourself as to why you have all these books. Then you log on to LibraryThing and everything is OK again... :)

P.S. With the price of Folio books, they had better not turn to dust for a long, long time.

Speaking to the price of books: Does anybody here know anything about D.N. Goodchild at The Press at Toad Hall? I mean they seem to have a large and growing catalog and the description of their wares sounds pretty good. Has anybody here actually looked at and handled their stuff and how does it stack up alongside Folio's wares?