So many books, so little time
I'm starting to think that maybe it *is* possible to be reading too many things at once. I still don't think one can *own* too many books... but alas, it may be possible for an individual to *buy* too many books. And it may be possible that I don't read as fast and with as much focus as I used to. [sigh]
I read eight books in January, most of them titles I had not read before, and one a second reading of a major novel, Kim Stanley Robinson's Red Mars. February is almost over, but I'm not even halfway through Green Mars, and I've got several other things on the burner:
- Priestess of the Forest by Ellen Evert Hopman
- Awakening the Buddha Within by Lama Surya Das
- Touching Enlightenment: Finding Realization in the Body by Reginald Ray.
That's two novels and two books on Buddhism. Green Mars is a second reading, and so is Awakening the Buddha Within, mostly; I started it, what, two years ago, almost? and bogged down somewhere in the chapter on Right Livelihood, so I started re-reading it from the beginning. The other two books are new reads. I *did* steam right through Shoes Outside the Door: Desire, Devotion, and Excess at San Francisco Zen Center, about which I should post.
The problem is not with those books, or with the volume of Rainer Maria Rilke's New Poems in the Edward Snow translation that I have been slowly absorbing. The problem is with all the *other* books I have bookmarks stuck in with which I'm not really engaged--the second of Christopher Penczak's Temple of Witchcraft series, and three or four books on writing, and something of Julia Cameron's, and that big textbook on Tibetan Buddhism, and the page-at-a-time books I keep in the bathroom.... I'm not focusing on anything long enough to make a dent. And I just received another spiritual memoir that I bought used, and I'm expecting another book on writing....
I make this vow: Not to buy any more books until I finish at least one, and preferably two, of the four books I'm reading! In any case, I have other books by Reginald Ray and Surya Das that I want to read, and Blue Mars when I finish Green.
Comments
I try to re-read at the rate of 2 new, 1 old, to help with the culling.
Do you post to the group Be Your Own Personal Library? I have found some good ideas for new reads there.
I agree with the not making books the way they used to. Trade size paperbacks tend to be a bit sturdier though.
I don't get people who say What, you'll read it again? like it's a big, strange thing. I bet they have TV series on DVD which they watch over and over. (Babylon 5 & Farscape for me!)
My mother-in-law is a strong, intelligent, vital woman in her eighties. She reads a great deal, but I don't think she ever re-reads a novel or memoir. She may look repeatedly at things that are history or mainly pictorial, but once the story is read, it's over. I do not understand.