Will the economic downturn force you to fall back on all those unread books on your shelves?Sam Jordison's blog post on the tyranny of the to-read pile, the books you own and sincerely mean to read (one day .... but somehow just never get round to) had me laughing even while nodding in agreement. Loved this :
Bibliophiles everywhere will be only too well acquainted with the demons of guilt and shame that such explorations would conjure. The to-read pile is more than just a physical stack of books: it's a tower of ambitions failed, hopes unrealised, good intentions unfulfilled. Worse still, it's a cold hard reminder of mortality. Already, I have intentions to read more books than I can hope to manage in a normal lifetime. How will this pile of books taunt me when I'm 64?Jordison was responding to this challenge on the Bookninja blog - :
Try it yourself and see how many pitiful excuses you can find for not reading a book you own.- as did Cynthia Crossen in the Wall Street Journal whose musings Jordison decries as :
... a catalogue of pathetic excuses ...I'm off to comb my own shelves now and to see what feeble reasons of my own I can think up for not reading the plenty that is there already!
Maybe a New Year's resolution should be to join the TBR Challenge again!
3 comments:
this reminds me of the story about the old king of siam who had more than 3000 concubines...i don't think he worried too much about 'to be *#@k' concubines...
and in my case i keep on buying loads of books and it'll take me at least several lifetimes if i were to read them all...but that doesn't worry me. i like to be surrounded by books...how i wish if they can morph into concubines....
ah pong
Starting to build my own to-read tower which is tottering on the edge of my desk. Sigh.
desk? DESK? amateur. Some people I know (who shall remain unnamed, heh) have whole bookcases full of unread books. In other households, people who want to read can't afford books.
There's no justice in the world. Which is why Khaled Hosseini is popular these days.
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