All the books we'll never read

My first semester of graduate school, one of my professors did some math that showed how many books it was possible to read in a lifetime. I know that sounds vague. The thing is, even as he was explaining, I was already halfway tuned out and figuring out why what he was talking about didn’t apply to me – I had always been a fast reader, and I read for fun more than most people, and anyway, all those calculations were slippery. What counted as a book? How long did it have to be?

His point, if I am remembering correctly, was more that there were a lot of books out there, and that it would be impossible to read them all, and not that we had a limited amount of time, and so we should only read good books, which is a point I have also seen made. I would have, I’m pretty sure, remembered if it were the latter, because I would have been made grumpy by it – what books are “good” is a deeply fraught question, and one whose answers are too often full of the biases of the person posing it.

It is true, though, that there are a lot of books in the world and it is impossible to read them all. Which, honestly, is fine. I’ve never wanted to read all the books that were ever written, and even less so when I think about reading for pleasure. Reading for a specific purpose, where I am trying to be a completist, is different, for me – I was very aware, in grad school, that there were entire time periods and major authors that I knew little to nothing about, and yet I had still fulfilled the requirements for a doctorate. I’m not saying this in the sense that “haha, that program was so easy, I really got away with something” but rather in the sense that the field is immense. I am a medievalist – my studies start over a thousand years of English language literature ago.

But unless there is a specific reason, for the most part, I am reading for myself. To soothe or to challenge or to please or relax or to learn. For whatever reason made me pick up that book on that day and time. I am not seeking all the books - I am seeking that specific book.

So no, I don’t generally feel guilt over the fact that there are a lot of books out there that I will never read, that there are many I will never even be aware of. I don’t regret picking up a favorite for a reread instead of seeking out something new. The only real difference that contemplating the immensity of possible books to read and the impossibility of getting to them all, the likelihood that I may miss something great has made is that I am much quicker to abandon a book now. Life is too short to waste it on something that isn’t working for me.

Except, every so often, there are books that I do think, I should really get to that. Don Quixote, War and Peace, Ulysses. Classics. Major works. I even have copies of all three on my shelf. And yet. Somehow I feel like the very same reasons that I feel like I should read them are the reasons I haven’t – they’re classics, major works. I should concentrate on them, give them more focus than reading them in bits and pieces before I go to sleep. I should treat them as a project, but who has time for that? And so they sit on the shelves, collecting dust and guilt.

Probably what I need to do is pull them out of the context of Great Works, and put them back into the context of story. To think of them as not something major that I should read, but just as books. Written because someone had something to say, or connections they wanted to make, or bills they needed to pay. Just stories, waiting to be read.