Blowing up BOMBS
I'm 40 years old, and it's time to admit something to myself. There are books on my bookshelf that I will never read.
It's just math, really. I've set a goal of reading 50 books in 2019, but I might blow that out of the water and manage 100. Of course, these are not all books that I already owned -- about half are likely to be new books purchased just this year.
In fact, of the 27 books I've read so far in 2019, 20 are books I acquired in the last twelve months. That means that only about a fifth of what I read, on average, is one of my BOMBS.
BOMBS: Books On My Book Shelf. The unexploded ordinance of the literary world.
So let's assume that I do manage to knock out 20 BOMBS a year. I have a to-read list of nearly 500 volumes right now. At my current rate of consumption, I could knock that out in about 25 years. And that's assuming that I keep pace with all of my new acquisitions.
Good thing it doesn't matter. St. Peter is not going to require a book report on everything I own as the price of admission into heaven. (Probably.) The number of books I read is not a high score to beat in the next lifetime. In short, there is absolutely, positively, no reason at all to let those unread BOMBS stress me out.
When I look at my shelves, I see the past and the future at the same time. I see the stories I have read, and the stories I have yet to read. A bookshelf without any unread books is fully in the past. I hope I always have a healthy sprinkling of unread books to spice up that static shelf.
It's just math, really. I've set a goal of reading 50 books in 2019, but I might blow that out of the water and manage 100. Of course, these are not all books that I already owned -- about half are likely to be new books purchased just this year.
In fact, of the 27 books I've read so far in 2019, 20 are books I acquired in the last twelve months. That means that only about a fifth of what I read, on average, is one of my BOMBS.
BOMBS: Books On My Book Shelf. The unexploded ordinance of the literary world.
So let's assume that I do manage to knock out 20 BOMBS a year. I have a to-read list of nearly 500 volumes right now. At my current rate of consumption, I could knock that out in about 25 years. And that's assuming that I keep pace with all of my new acquisitions.
Good thing it doesn't matter. St. Peter is not going to require a book report on everything I own as the price of admission into heaven. (Probably.) The number of books I read is not a high score to beat in the next lifetime. In short, there is absolutely, positively, no reason at all to let those unread BOMBS stress me out.
When I look at my shelves, I see the past and the future at the same time. I see the stories I have read, and the stories I have yet to read. A bookshelf without any unread books is fully in the past. I hope I always have a healthy sprinkling of unread books to spice up that static shelf.
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Jason
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Mar 20, 2019 07:07AM
I'm definitely in the same boat, with many books on my shelf I will never find time to read if I live to be 100. But that's a very nice way to look at it--that the shelf contains past and future, and a healthy shelf should contain a good amount of both.
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Jason wrote: "I'm definitely in the same boat, with many books on my shelf I will never find time to read if I live to be 100. But that's a very nice way to look at it--that the shelf contains past and future, a..."Thanks! I don't know about you, but I'm kind of tired of being made to feel guilty around an activity that I do for pleasure. I used to feel the same way about my Netflix queue, like it was an obligation I was not meeting and would somehow get in trouble for.
I'm also getting better about not keeping every book that I've ever owned... but that's another blog entry, and shall be posted another time.
