That super-long list of books you never get around to reading

[ladyofshalott]

So I have this problem. Every time I go into Barnes and Noble, I cannot help buying at least one book. Since I go into Barnes and Noble all the time, my reading pace can never seem to keep up with my buying pace. And so I now have about thirty books on my desk waiting for me to read them.

There are just so many books I need to read! It's overwhelming. I'm afraid I am going to die of old age before I finish reading all of them.

So, I was just wondering if anyone else feels overwhelmed by the number of books they plan on reading sometime in the future, and what some of those books might be.

This is a very small sampling of the books on my list:

James Joyce's Ulysses
Hemingway's For Whom The Bell Tolls
Plato's Republic
Sylvia Plath's The Bell Jar
Freakonomics
Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged
Meville's Moby Dick
Gabriel Garcia Marquez's Cien Anos de Soledad (100 Years of Solitude)
Heller's Catch-22
Chaucer's Canterbury Tales
Chopin's The Awakening
Kerouac's On the Road
Kesey's One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest

I just need to lock myself in my room for a few years, I think...

[erikeliot]

I have an abundance of books that I need to read as well. I work at Barnes and Noble so I take full advantage of the 30% discount off everything. My list off the top of my head looks something like this:

- O'Brian's The Things They Carried
- Dylan Thomas'Selected Poems
- Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451
- Orwell's 1984
- Huxley's Point Counter Point
- Huxley's Ape and Essence
- Huxley's After Many a Summer Dies a Swan
- Huxley's Antic Hay
- Hasbery's A Raisin in the Sun
- King's Dark Tower 5: Wolves of the Calla
- King's Dark Tower 6: Song of Susannah
- King's Dark Tower 7: The Dark Tower

and so much more...

[manolia]

So I have this problem. Every time I go into Barnes and Noble, I cannot help buying at least one book. Since I go into Barnes and Noble all the time, my reading pace can never seem to keep up with my buying pace. And so I now have about thirty books on my desk waiting for me to read them.

Ok i have the same problem..maybe who should do a group therapy thing. The books waiting on my bookcase, unread, are more than a hundred...and i keep buying books anyway..

[Behemoth]

We don't have Barnes and Noble in my part of the UK, (or any part??) but I do spend an inordinate amount of time in our equivalents, e.g. Waterstones, Borders. In the words of Primo Levi, "I have a weakness for printed paper." My list includes some of the following:
Jane Austen Pride and Prejudice
Robert Cox, The Meaning of Night
Vladimir Nabokov Lolita
Gustav Flaubert Madame Bovary
Dante's Purgatorio and Paradisio
Boccaccio's The Decameron
Leo Tolstoy War and Peace

[Whitechapel]

I have admitted to my book addiction and no longer buy them. My home doesn't have wallpaper, we have bookcases. At one time I could boast that I had read every book I own, but no longer! I go to the library to get books for my husband, vowing to get none for myself as I have so many books that I own to read, but I invariably succumb. Other addictions cost people their lives and livelihoods, mine costs me my eysight and my sleep!

[malwethien]

Ok i have the same problem..maybe who should do a group therapy thing. The books waiting on my bookcase, unread, are more than a hundred...and i keep buying books anyway..

Hey Manolia Can I join that group therapy session? I seem to have the same problem and I can't go into any bookstore without buying something...really, I'm hopeless.

Anyway..my list is:

American Gods - Neil Gaiman
Neverwhere - Neil Gaiman
His Dark Materials Book 2: The Subtle Knife - Philip Pullman
His Dark Materials Book 3: The Amber Spyglass - Philip Pullman
Snow - Orhan Pamuk
Absurdistan - Gary Something
Tropic of Cancer - Henry Miller
Infinite Jest - David Foster Wallace
So Long and Thanks for all the Fish - Douglas Adams
Mostly Harmless - Douglas Adams
Arthur and George - Julian Barnes

I'm hoping to read those titles in 2007.... good luck to me....

[manolia]

Hey Malwe always glad to talk to you, even in a group therapy..

[grace86]

At least I am not the only one with that problem...whew! Barnes & Noble is like an infectious disease whenever I go in there--I always take something back out.

But I too have admitted my addiction and no longer buy books, until I am done with mine anyway.

Mine are:

The Count of Monte Cristo - Dumas
The Dante Club
Lady Chatterly's Lover - Lawrence
Wuthering Heights - Bronte
Age of Innocence - Wharton
Emma - Austen
The Moonstone - Collins
Dandelion Wine - Bradbury
Martian Chronicles - Bradbury

Those are just a FEW.

[NickAdams]

Greetings fellow bibliophiles,

I spend my lunch hour at a used bookstore in Brooklyn. I got to Barnes & Nobles 5 days a week just to read the synopsis on as many books as I can.

I have too many to list. I keep a few in a lock-box: The Marble Faun and A Green Bough, Early Edition of Sanctuary both by William Faulkner; First Edition of A Farewell to Arms, First Edition of Islands in the Stream, First Edition of A Moveable Feast all three by Ernest Hemingway.

Collected short stories:
Ernest Hemingway, William Faulkner, Jorge Luis Borges, Gabrial Garcia-Marquez, Stig Dagerman, James Joyce, Samuel Beckett, Anton Chekov, Vladimir Nabokov, Jean-Paul Sartre, Franz Kafka, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Thomas Pynchon, Herman Melville, Mark Twain, Raymond Carver and Woody Allen.

Plays:
All the Greeks, Lorca, Beckett, Williams, Shaw, Sartre, Shakespeare and Isben.

Poetry:
Dickinson, Hemingway, Faulkner, Whitman, Frost, Blake, Shakespeare and Lorca.

and so much more ...

[Aiculík]

I used to have the same problem with buying books... but I'm almost cured now. And how did I manage that? Well that's easy - I begun to study... literature.

Not only that I stopped buying books, but my list of unread books is almost empty... because I recently schratched out all books that were on it for more than six months. If a book wasn't able to intrigue me enough to read it for that long - it probaly never would. I have to read so much crap for my study (altough most of them are considered great classics) that I don't see why should I force myself to read anything I don't like in my free time.

[kenikki]

I have an abundance of books that I need to read as well. I work at Barnes and Noble so I take full advantage of the 30% discount off everything. My list off the top of my head looks something like this:

- O'Brian's The Things They Carried
- Dylan Thomas'Selected Poems
- Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451
- Orwell's 1984
- Huxley's Point Counter Point
- Huxley's Ape and Essence
- Huxley's After Many a Summer Dies a Swan
- Huxley's Antic Hay
- Hasbery's A Raisin in the Sun
- King's Dark Tower 5: Wolves of the Calla
- King's Dark Tower 6: Song of Susannah
- King's Dark Tower 7: The Dark Tower

and so much more...

omg erikeliot, you need to read 1984 pronto!

[Nossa]

I've got at least 20 books that I couldn't even put on my current 'to-read' list..lol
Some names are:
Age of innocence - Edith Wharton
The playboy of the western world - John Synge
The trial - Franz Kafka
Ghosts - Henrik Ibsen
The world according to Garp - John Irving
The prophet - Khalil Gibran
New atlantis - Francis Bacon....

[ladyofshalott]

Well, at least I am not alone.

I guess I should just check out book from the library more, so that I don't end up with fifty books in my bookcase that I haven't read. But I like being able to scribble in the margins! And using the library doesn't fix the problem of not having enough time to read everything that ought to be read.

Just out of curiosity...what would those group therapy sessions involve? What would our treatment be?

[metal134]

I have the same problem, but for me, it's less about it being an addiction as it is something else. See, I consider myself well read but there are a boatload of classics that I've never read. There aree so many of them though. So what I do is build myself a nice back catalouge of the classics with the understanding that I have all my life to read them. At some point, I will run out of classics to buy and I can just keep on reading.

[SteveH]

Ulysses - tried, gave up.
Chaucer's 'Troilus and Criseyde' - tried twice, once in modern English translation, once in the original. Gave up twice.
Anna Karenina - one day.
'The small house at Allington' and 'The last chronicle of Barset' by Trollope. I've read the other four Barchester novels, so I ought to finish the series off, but I can't summon up much enthusiasm.
Shakespeare's non-dramatic poems, apart from some of his sonnets.
Loads of other books which I've owned for years or decades, and which silently reproach me from my shelves.