The Books We Own And Will Never Read

Let’s get real, be honest, face the facts: There are some books on my shelves I will never read. The reasons for this are manifold: the contents of the shelves are not static, as I keep adding to them; my shelves are disorganized, which means that many books escape detection as I inspect the shelves looking for the next book to take on; my tastes in reading have changed, leading me to steadfastly ignore an older acquisition–it just does not catch my attention; some books have not rewarded my reading attempts in the past and have been put back, perhaps to be visited again someday–but we both suspect that encounter will not happen; and lastly, most grimly, most cosmically, time is running out–given rates of acquisition, my physical and intellectual capacities, my waking hours, my many other commitments, some tasks will remain incomplete in this life, as they do in all others. Among them the reading of books we thought we would read some day.

I may have presented this as a ‘problem’ in the opening lines above, but it really isn’t. Every owner of books knows this; you buy books not just to read them but because, quite simply, books are artifacts we like to keep close by, to offer reassurance of all kinds. They are talismans, security blankets, good-luck charms, mirrors of ourselves, souls in the bodies of our lives; call them what you will, they aren’t just objects to be opened and ‘consumed’ and ‘exhausted’; not every fruitful and significant relationship with an object requires us to integrate it fully or even partially into ourselves. When we go to a museum and look at a work of art, we do not bring it home with us, we do not seek to own it; it is enough for us that we were able to experience it in some way, no matter how attenuated. When we go into the outdoors, we do not bring home the proverbial bubbling brook or dale, except by way of photographic reproduction. Our lives brought us together with these; they will take us apart. We will have had some measure of that which we saw and felt and tasted and touched; some, perhaps not all.

Books are meant to be read, of course. And an archetypal mode of pretension in our world is a kind of shallow display, a pointing in a direction we will never go. Books can play that function for those who deploy them as such; you might be able to signal erudition of a socially valuable kind by your book ownership. We should tolerate such pretension; there are worse things to be inauthentic about, and if the outcome is a room full of books for us to look at, admire, and browse through, then so be it.

My ownership of books I will never read is made easier by being a parent; I reassure myself periodically that I’m putting together an inheritance for my daughter. In a life marked by tiny failures at every step, this is one to be proud of.