Too many books

Too little time

I went on vacation, and returned with a half dozen more books than I had when I left. I don't know when I will find the time to read them all, since I already have a long list of books that I either haven't started or haven't finished. If I hold to my usual pattern with these new books, I will read about half of them all the way through, read another couple part way through, and will never quite find the time or energy to read one of them at all.

At one level this seems to be madness, but it's also a relatively common madness – at least, among people in my circle. Indeed, Umberto Eco (who, to be clear, is not a member of my circle) made a virtue out of the size of his unread library, and argued for the merits of an “antilibrary,” full of unread books covering subjects one did not know. I have tried to adopt that mindset, but I haven't yet convinced myself. Instead, I feel a kind of pressure that all the unread and partly read books exert on me.

That said, the pressure is perhaps not as much of an influence as it might sound. I already have so many unread books that I can’t perceive any difference from adding another half-dozen. There might have been a time when that pressure caused me to think twice about acquiring another book, but that time is long past. I have tried more than once to “get organized” with my unread books, and it is interesting to see the list of unread books if I choose to compile one. But I can't honestly say that any of my organizational or cataloging efforts have made any difference in terms of the speed with which I read, or the reduction of my backlog of books.

I did once try a scheme where I could only buy a book if I had finished two books, on the theory that I would then at least be reducing the net backlog. It didn’t last very long, and I suspect that I didn’t really commit to making it work. It’s possible that if I had an assistant keeping track of this for me that I could get such accounting correct; but as a practice that I did for myself, it didn’t offer enough reward to justify the overhead.

Adding to the challenge is that I don't even necessarily retain specific details of books very well, so I sometimes find myself revisiting books that I have read previously. Re-reading either reminds me of what's in them, or allows me to simply enjoy them again. This is not so different from how I deal with movies and TV shows: at least some of the time I am not inclined to watch anything new, but instead choose to rewatch something that I remember enjoying but that I don't remember in any detail.

There are people who think it’s pointless to rewatch something you’ve previously seen, and I can respect that position – but it’s not how I usually feel. That said, there’s a kind of mirror image experience in which I think I’ve found a new movie that sounds promising from its description. Then, as I start watching, it seems… familiar. Too familiar. It’s one thing to choose to rewatch a movie intentionally, but it seems like an error to be rewatching something when you thought it would be new. It’s funny to realize that my reactions are more about my expectations than about the content per se. It’s not as though I object to rewatching something I’ve seen before; indeed, I do that fairly often. It’s just that I seem to have a mental toggle between “new stuff” and “familiar stuff,” and I object when there’s a mismatch between what I wanted and what I got.

My disinclination to revisit a work is different for music. I have accumulated a substantial library of recorded music that I like, where the whole point is to revisit certain pieces. My study has both CDs and books arranged on shelves, but their expected use is quite different: the books are mostly read once (or perhaps not at all). The typical case for a book would represent failure for a CD: something that I had listened to once and then never revisited.

Setting aside music and its different norm, it’s interesting to consider what does happen when revisiting things that I once liked (whether book, movie, or TV show). It can sometimes be educational in unexpected ways. In the best case, I discover that the revisited artifact is a genuine work of art that yields new insights or new perspectives when being revisited. Or even if there are no new insights, it’s a chance to re-experience the same positive feelings I remember from the first time.

More often, I see new flaws when revisiting a work. There’s some combination of seeing more of the seams that betray how the work was constructed, and a deeper perspective than what my younger self could perceive. Overall, that kind of experience is at best mixed: it amounts to realizing that something that seemed kind of good when I last encountered it is maybe not so good anymore. Either I've changed too much, or the culture has changed too much, or perhaps both… but in any case, the artifact is no longer as compelling as it once was.

My pursuit of books seems to be partly an admirable form of diligent scholarship reflecting wide ranging interests, and partly a late-capitalist corruption of scholarship by a commodity fetish. I imagine that buying books will allow me to learn everything the author has chosen to explain, but I repeatedly fail to account for the slow and uncertain process of transferring that information from the book into my brain. Holding onto the books, whether read or unread, treats them as totems of knowledge – even if I haven’t yet learned what they have to offer, or have forgotten it, I can in principle (re)acquire that knowledge.