The reason: I buy books and don’t read them.
Now, I find this argument completely erroneous. The books are already published (and the trees already dead) when I buy them. And it is also not true that I don’t read the books I buy. I do. I just take my time. It can’t be helped that I keep finding books in libraries that I want to read. You never know when those will be free again.
The accuser is a friend of mine, and the deal is that if I finish reading all the books I own that I haven’t already read, he’ll buy me a book. This day may never come, but here’s an attempt in that direction. Here is a list of all the books I own but haven’t read. (They go from meh to really, really good ones.)
Books that I don’t plan to read for a long time for various worthwhile reasons
1. The Pilgrim’s Progress, John Bunyan, 1678
I did not buy this. I inherited it from my grandfather (in other words, I found a bunch of ancient-looking books among his things and stole them). Therefore I am not required to read it, although I might.
2. Scenes of Clerical Life, George Eliot, 1858
Same as above, plus I can’t stand her.
3. War and Peace, Leo Tolstoy, 1869
I bought this and I want to read it, but having been allowed to leave this alone (by accuser-friend), I’m going to make things easier for myself and put ol’ War and Peace in this godforsaken category.
4. The Story of Language, Charles Barber, 1972
I got this from my cousin when he was moving to NZ and couldn’t take all his books with him. (I distinctly remember also getting a soft porn novel with that lot, but it has disappeared. Or taken away because “I was too young”. Shame.) Anyway, it seems too boring to read.
5. Thomas Jefferson, Gene Lisitzky, 1933
Same as 1.
6. Ruminations on the Song of Solomon, ?, ?
Same as 1.
7. Lincoln’s Stories and Speeches, edited by Edward Frank Allen, 192?
Same as 1.
Books that I don’t care to read, but will
Novels
1. Flash Gordon Book One: Massacre in the 22nd Century, David Hagberg?, 1980
2. The House of the Seven Gables, Nathaniel Hawthorne, 1851
I did not buy this.
3. Schindler’s Ark, Thomas Keneally, 1982
4. The Shipping News, E Annie Proulx, 1991
5. The Great American Novel, Philip Roth, 1973
I want to read more Roth, just not this one, which I bought for its cool cover art, and later discovered it was about baseball.
6. Train to Pakistan, Khushwant Singh, 1956
7. The Hobbit, JRR Tolkein, 1937
I did not buy this.
Plays
8. Tughlaq, Girish Karnad, 1972
Short stories
9. Curious Lives: Adventures from the Ferret Chronicles, Richard Bach, 2005
Needless to say, I did not buy this.
10. Heart of Darkness and other stories, Joseph Conrad, 1902
11. The Shrinking Woman and other stories, edited by Meenakshi Varma and Annie Chandy Mathew, 2009
I got this and the next one as complimentary copies for helping out with the launch and stuff.
12. The Curse of the Bird and other stories, edited by Annie Chandy Mathew and Mary Mathew, 2009
Books that are in French and therefore will take forever to read
13. Lettres de mon moulin, Alphonse Daudet, 1869
14. L’Histoire d’une tulipe, adapté du roman d’Alexandre Dumas, La Tulipe noire, 1907
15. Hernani, Victor Hugo, 1830
16. Contes de la bécasse, Guy de Maupassant, 1883
17. La Gloire de mon père, Marcel Pagnol, 1957
18. Flush: Biographie, Virginia Woolf, 1933
All of the above were presents or my cousin’s (the one who went to NZ), except for the Woolf, which I bought for barely anything at a sale.
Books that are in various stages of unread
Novels
19. The Tin Drum, Günter Grass, 1959
20. Kafka on the Shore, Haruki Murakami, 2000
21. Delhi: A Novel, Khushwant Singh, 1990
Stole this from my dad, I think.
22. The Tagore Omnibus: Volume One, Penguin, 2005
23. To the Lighthouse, Virginia Woolf, 1927
Poetry
24. A New Anthology of Modern Poetry, edited by Selden Rodman, 1938
25. 60 Indian Poets, edited by Jeet Thayil, 2008
26. Mosaic, edited by Karuna Sivasaila, 2007
Complimentary copy.
27. The Prophet, Khalil Gibran, 1923
This was a present from my aunt.
28. The Complete Poems of DH Lawrence, Wordsworth Edition, 1994
This was a present from my dad.
Plays
29. Four Great Plays, Henrik Ibsen, 1984
Short stories
30. Him with His Foot in his Mouth and Other Stories, Saul Bellow, 1998
31. Stories from Ladakh, Kusum Kapur, 1994
This was given to my family by Aunty Kusum who wrote the book. She used to be my grandmother’s friend. When her Alzheimer’s got really bad, her daughter her took her home to Pondicherry. I wonder if she’s still alive. One of the most interesting human beings I have ever met.
32. Britain and her Neighbours Book One: Tales from Far and Near, edited by David Frew and Laurence Hogg, 1937
Found this one lying around the house. No idea where it came from.
Non-fiction
33. The Art of the Novel, Milan Kundera, 1986
I’ve read the more general essays, but I want to wait till I’ve read certain novels of his before I proceed.
Books that are in various stages of unread and that I want to read slowly because they are exquisite
Novels
34. Crime and Punishment, Fyodor Dostoevsky, 1866
35. Justine, Philosophy in the Bedroom, and Other Writings, Marquis de Sade, ?
Short stories
36. Diary of a Mad Man and Selected Stories, Nikolai Gogol, ?
Miscellaneous
37. The Book of Imaginary Beings, Jorges Luis Borges with Margarita Guerrero, revised, enlarged and translated by Norman Thomas di Giovanni in collaboration with the author, 2002 ADDED 28/05/09 (I forgot about this one.)
Books that I haven’t touched but want to read
38. Les Misérables: Volume One, Victor Hugo, 1862
39. Love in the Time of Cholera, Gabriel García Márquez, 1985
40. Children of the Albatross, Anaïs Nin, 1959
41. The Makioka Sisters, Junichirō Tanizaki, 1943 – 48
Books that I haven’t touched but am dying to read
42. The Brothers Karamazov, Fyodor Dostoevsky, 1881
43. Netochka Nezvanova, Fyodor Dostoevsky, 1849
44. The Name of the Rose, Umberto Eco, 1980
Present from N.
45. One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, 1962
Present from my mother.
46. The Tale of Genji, Murasaki Shikibu, 11th century
47. Diary of a Mad Old Man, Junichirō Tanizaki, 1961
*
Well, that’s the end of that then. I thought the number was closer to 20, which I could’ve read by my birthday in November, but 47 will take me an entire year with very little other-book-distraction.
Assuming I don’t borrow anything from the library, I could finish all the books that I bought in the above list, which is about 27. But that wasn’t the deal. In fact, the new deal, which was formed while I was compiling the list was “I’ll get you a book if you only have 10 left” and that 10 includes all books, whether I bought them or not.
Oh well, at least I have numbers. I’m actually feeling a little bad for the trees.
This is a splendid idea. I am going to make a list like this too. Though I know you only did it on provocation.
Why is “The Key” here? Didn’t you read to us from there?
That’s some horrible logic, like saying you’re killing cows by eating steaks. Funny that you use the same defense, “but the cows are already dead!”
Teach him a lesson/get him to buy you a new book: loan out these books and sell the ones you’ll never read – that’ll count as having your books serve their purpose/been read.
The Hobbit was rather fun, a sort of Tolkien-lite. I remember enjoying it when I was 13 or so.
“Love in the time of Cholera” sounds bloody awful, bloody period pieces D:
@ Neha
The Key is in that list? Where? There are two other Tanizakis, I know.
@ Qishin
I’d never sell my books! Well, OK, some of them, maybe. But in general I can’t bear to part with them.
I’m not a big fan of Tolkein, judging by the 20 pages or so I read of LOTR and half a movie, but it looks bearable. Marquez used to be a favourite with me, but in the larger scheme of things (which includes Dostoevsky and Tanizaki), he’s OK. I doubt Cholera is awful though.
I used to suffer from this but then I put all the books I knew I wouldn’t care for into a box to sell to a used book store. Problem solved.
Tolkein is really boring.
Alexander Solzhenitsyn was a champion bore. But I still managed to read everything he wrote and also made an ill-planned visit to U.S.S.R (I don’t quite know what they it called these days,Transylvania perhaps ?). It was a dismal trip, though I was excited to see vodka guzzling grizzlies. Things that excite you at 19 make you want to send yourself to the gallows at 25.
Adventures from the Ferret Chronicles – This, btw, is an excellent title. Pity that it’s already been taken. Bill O’Reilly could have made wonderful use of it while writing his 3rd or 4th autobiography.
@ Lane
Can’t do that, I can’t.
@ Scherezade
Solzhenitsyn doesn’t seem as exciting as Dostoevsky, true.
Am I the only one here that loves Tolkien? How can you hate a guy who spent years plodding on a working mythos for a fantasy setting that redefined how the world looked at Elves?
@qishin
You ARE killing cows by eating steak. The day you stop eating steak is the day cows stop feeling the need to fall sick and die at calfbirth or get hit by a rogue tractor.
Worse than that, by eating cows you are eating wealth. Now unless you happen to be a Randian who associates wealth with pleasure (I have a very dim recollection of having read a 2 page monologue by a Francisco D’Anconias about money in Atlas Shrugged in my youth. Strange that I remember the guy’s name so well and not his rant), while your steak does offer a lot of just-rightly-charred fleshy bits for your gastric juices to suck on, know that you are violating a time-worn taboo as sacred as the one forbidding murder. In fact, there must be some hypothesis whereby it can be proven that by consuming the flesh of the sacred cow, you are condoning murder, incest, sodomy, Onanism and religious conversions.
Besides, Cow is Mother. Which lends a perhaps previously unexplored opportunity for ‘ur mom’ jibes in a Hindu Brahmin setting.
And ‘The Hobbit’ isn’t Tolkien-lite. Sure, it didn’t have Sauron. Or a blond Legolas, or Uruk-hai or the Witch King of Angmar (I totally love that title) or Tom Bombadil or Liv Tyler.
OK, fine, it’s Tolkien-lite. But it’s still awesome.
And I agree, ‘Love in the time of Cholera’ does sound awful.
@Aditi,
I see you got The Name of the Rose in your dying-to-read list. I read that when I was still in college and found it alright though now, after reading more Eco, I see that there is prolly a lot I may have missed in it. I wish there was an annotated e-version of everything Eco has written somewhere online so I don’t have to worry about having missed any references.
I’d love to read that Ruminations on the Song of Solomon. When I googled it, the first result was this post, hmph.
The lists are great. And you know I’m on the environmental freak side of a lot of questions…don’t have AC; avoid plastic packaging…all that stuff.
But books just aren’t that big of a problem compared to most of what we do! In fact, in the end, they are good, cause they make us smarter and a smart population is more likely to solve the problems we face. Plus they have a long shelf life! (had to say that). If you don’t read them, somebody will in a few months/years/decades…
on a related note, newspapers are not as bad a lot of people think, either–look at this:
http://www.slate.com/id/2185143/
for perspective.
ok, now I’m reall putting off the work that is piled up on my desk!
michael
[...] of blog posts ago, I was complaining about how this friend of mine refused to buy me books because I own over 40 books that I haven’t read. According to him, this is the equivalent of killing trees. Now, while the logic of that may be [...]
I stopped counting at 50. I no longer have a to-be-read pile, I have a to-be-read shelf or to be honest a books-I-think-I-have-an-earthly-chance-of-reading shelf. And I’ve just ordered another one today to save poor Salt. It’s a thin one. I might even get round to it this lifetime. I have tried going down the ebook line – I was one of the few in the UK to own a Rocket eBook waaaaaay before Amazon jumped on the band wagon. It was actually okay but it didn’t read PDFs. I’ve done a couple of book reviews recently where I’ve managed to get an electronic copy from the publisher and they’re great for finding quotes. But I still prefer a real book. Sorry, trees.
Oh yes, real books any day. I’ve only read one book entirely in electronic format and it was for a review.