For me the mere sight of an old leatherbound book connotes inspiring appreciation for knowledge. When I'm watching a scene in a movie that has a personal library in the background with antique books on the shelves, I find I suddenly can't wait for the movie to end so I can rush home and start reading books and hopefully furthering my ambition to one day become a literary genius.
When I was a younger and (hard to believe) lazier fellow, I would sometimes acquire books with the intention to read them, but easily grew weary if the narration dragged for a page too many. And the book would find its way onto a shelf there to reside perpetually with anywhere from 20 to 400 pages forever unread. Then another book would catch my eye and the process would commence once more until little mountains of unfinished readings piled up around me. Occasionally, in the course of straightening up my living quarters, I would relocate one such book or another and a dull pang of guilt would reverbrate through me as I recalled how I'd always meant to get back to it and complete the reading I'd begun however many months previous.
I guess it was during my college years that I developed a stronger resolve about such things and determined to finish reading books I'd begun no matter how unsatisfying. And happily I pounce on every opportunity to show off to people the bookcases in my living room in which I have arranged, however neurotically, collectible editions of all the books I've ever read in the very sequence in which I read them.
Nevertheless, it still happens sometimes that my literary appetite gets unrealistic and I try to read more than one book at a time. And some of them, while I know they are not eternally abandoned, do get neglected for tragically extended durations with the result that I can now profess to be reading all of the following somewhat simultaneously (numbers in parentheses indicate how many pages I've read so far):
There Will Be Dragons ~ John Ringo (80 pages)
The Idiot ~ Fyodor Dostoevsky (10 pages)
The Stupidest Angel ~ Christopher Moore (130 pages)
Walden ~ Henry David Thoreau (125 pages)
Tobacco Road ~ Erskine Caldwell (7 pages)
Ghost Writer ~ John Harwood (212 pages)
The Spear ~ Luis De Wohl (18 pages)
Xenocide ~ Orson Scott Card (98 pages)
The Acts of King Arthur ~ John Steinbeck (216 pages)
Frankly, I didn't realize the list was getting so formidable until I compiled it here for the purpose of writing this blog, and it occurs to me blatantly how necessary it is for me now to buckle down and do some marathon reading. Which is a good thing because I've been babying myself with inmoderate intellectual idleness lately and it's really time to fulfill the promise of supreme nerdiness that I have always been blessed with as my destiny.
