by Ed Simon 

I’m haunted by the enormity of all of that which I’ll never read. This need not be a fear related to those things that nobody can ever read, the missing works of Aeschylus and Euripides, the lost poems of Homer; or, those works that were to have been written but which the author neglected to pen, such as Milton’s Arthurian epic. Nor am I even really referring to those titles which I’m expected to have read, but which I doubt I’ll ever get around to flipping through (In Search of Lost Time, Anna Karenina, etc.), and to which my lack of guilt induces more guilt than it does the real thing. No, my anxiety is born from the physical, material, fleshy, thingness of the actual books on my shelves, and my night-stand, and stacked up on the floor of my car’s backseat or wedged next to Trader Joe’s bags and empty pop bottles in my trunk. Like any irredeemable bibliophile, my house is filled with more books than I could ever credibly hope to read before I die (even assuming a relatively long life, which I’m not).

“A strong and bitter book-sickness floods one’s soul,” writes Nicholas Basbanes in A Gentle Madness: Bibliophiles, Bibliomanes, and the Eternal Passion for Books. “How ignominious to be strapped to this ponderous mass of paper, print, and dead men’s sentiments!” My books sit two levels deep on the de rigueur millennial’s sagging white IKEA BILLY shelves, the planks having lost their dowls while buckling underneath the weight, titles creatively pushed into any absence that they can credibly fill. There are cairns of books on my office floor, megaliths of books along my windowsill, ziggurats of books in the mudroom, the basement, the attic. A whole shelf of Penguin Classics, their zebra-colored spines announcing themselves – Castiglione’s The Book of Courtier, Baudelaire’s Flowers of Evil. Sprinkled throughout the rest are an assortment of Oxford World Classics, Library of America editions, Nortons. There are other classics – The Aeneid, Moby-Dick, et el. There are contemporary works – Portnoy’s Complaint, Slouching Towards Bethlehem. Categories for reference and poetry, academic and journalistic. Then there is the disposable that I’ve held onto (too polite to name names). Naturally, the question posed to me by any visitor who isn’t a bibliophile (though predictably I know few of that sort) is if I’ve read all of these books. My reply, as close to a joke as I can muster about the affliction, is that I’ve at least opened all of them. I think. Read more »