Sunday, January 14, 2007

An insatiable appetite

I've been going through my books for several hours, adding titles or ISBN numbers to Library Thing, a way to catalog your books online and, as you can see to the right, add a little display of random books from your library onto your blog. (All of these ideas were, naturally, stolen from my ideal blogger.)

Unfortunately, going through all of my books has reawakened a terrible appetite in me: I want to read every one of them.

Even if I had all the free time I could ask for between opening my eyes in the morning and slipping down between my blankets at night, I would never have enough time to read all the books I'd like to. But I don't have all that free time. I work about 40 hours a week, eat meals, spend about an hour a day exercising, watch empty TV shows, which makes my time boil down to approximately an hour of reading per day. This is the great tragedy in the lives of all bibiophiles--not necessarily that we only have an hour to read, but that the time we do have is always, inevitably too, too short, and there are always too many things to do besides read.

For instance: prepare a sharing time for tomorrow's Primary, compile some biographical information on Wallace Stegner (author of Angle of Repose) for my book club, mash my grad school application essay with a meat tenderizer, apologize to my sister for getting on her nerves, and attempt to explain to myself exactly why I keep buying scrapbook supplies I never use.

It's time to declutter my life. No more scrapbook supplies, no more grad school, no more interactions with family members, no more interactions with anybody. I'm taking a sabbatical month (maybe two) to catch up on all that reading I've been missing.

Do you think it will make me happier?

2 comments:

Nemesis said...

You honor me with your words. :-) Isn't LibraryThing addictive? I'm trying to decide if I want to pay to be able to put all my books up there.

Lizardbreath McGee said...

Ah, no. You honor me with your presence. Thanks for dropping by!

And I'll have to check out the paying version. I haven't explored that much, but I've already spent several hours just uploading loads of books. I'm definitely in the thrall of addiction here. :^)