I know what you’re thinking: books are good for you. How can books be an addiction?
When you want them all. All the time.
I have a book about collecting books.
I have a book about making books ( and yes, I have read it ):
( How many cocaine addicts study the cultivation of the coca plant ? )
Every time I see someones list of interesting books, I’m off to Amazon with my 1-Click finger all itchy to buy. For example, in my post about Jörg Colberg’s photo blog, I mentioned his Amazon Wish List. Which I studied closely. All of the photo books look like must-haves. And at least one of the others, The Whisperers: Private Life in Stalin’s Russia looks like it might be really good.
This morning while scrolling through the Daily Dish blog, there was a post that started, “For Sunday, a paragraph from one of my favorite Atlantic articles of all time: [ link ] The linked article is a long, but well-written rant by B. R. Myers about the state of current literature. Here’s a brief sample:
… Jeering at status-conscious consumers, bandying about words like “ontological” and “nominalism,” chanting Red River hokum as if it were from a lost book of the Old Testament: this is what passes for profundity in novels these days. Even the most obvious triteness is acceptable, provided it comes with a postmodern wink. What is not tolerated is a strong element of action—unless, of course, the idiom is obtrusive enough to keep suspense to a minimum. Conversely, a natural prose style can be pardoned if a novel’s pace is slow enough, …
Unfortunately for me, the article ended with eight highly recommended books. Eight ! All of which will be calling to me, needing to be made mine.
My stack of waiting-to-be-read books is one, two, three … twenty-six. I cannot, I must not, I will not buy any more books until I’ve read those. Except for maybe …
Edited to add: Metafilter picked up the Telegraph.co.uk article titled Great Unread Books: Which classics are you ashamed to admit you have never read? — and as of this moment ( Monday evening ) they have 217 responses. The article itself also has some entertaining comments, for example, this from commenter Walt O’Brian :
Finnegan’s Wake and Ulysses are two I have studiously avoided after having dented the hood of my mental auto with them in the late Sixties. No amount of substance abuse made them palatable….
Portrait of An Artist was so bombastically egotistical and ethnically triumphalistic I considered changing ethnicities …
Dickens, Plato, and Madame Bovary seem to be popular to not read.
-Julie
