The Pile is Too Large, or Why I Don't Re-Read

I wrote once before about my virtual to-be-read pile, which consists of books on hold on the library web site. I've discovered that you can also just use the web site to create a list, which doesn't reserve the book, but just stores the title, so now I've got one of those going too. My "hold list" contains 56 books and my "list list" contains 21 books. This is bad, because it's just occured to me, in light of this blog, that if I read at my current rate, it will be 77 weeks before I've read all these books. And every week or so I add a few books to the list, so really, it's going to take even longer!

People sometimes ask me if I ever re-read books, and I look at them like they are crazy. Who could possibly spend precious reading time on something you've already read? There are so many books out there, and I've got to read them all, and I'll never be able to, even if I never re-read anything! I know this is kind of nutty, and there are lots of good reasons to re-read a book, though none of those reasons are good enough to satisfy me.

Sometimes when I finish a book, I put it down with a satisfied feeling of "well, that's one more book that's moved from the 'unread' stack to the 'read' stack," the 'unread' stack consisting of all the fiction written in English.