book hoarding for the chronically worrisome.

I've just finished The Polysyllabic Spree, well, basically. I have to admit, I didn't read the whole thing. The book is a collection of the essays Nick Hornby wrote for the Believer about the books he bought and/or read from September 2003 to November 2004, interspersed with short excerpts from a handful of the books discussed. And I only hesitated to say I finished the book because I actually skipped over the last two excerpts. Nick Hornby has a distinct way of writing. So much so, in fact, that he's one of those authors (like, say, David Sedaris) who shows up in blurbs for other writers' paperbacks trying to convince you that you'll like it because surely you like Nick Hornby or know someone who likes Nick Hornby or have seen a movie based on a Nick Hornby novel. What happened to me toward the end of Spree was that I didn't want to stop reading his style and start reading Patrick Hamilton for two or three pages. Would you suddenly throw your car into second gear for a few moments while going 65 down the 5? The thought occurs to me that maybe you would. My car is an automatic, after all. And besides that, when do you ever really go 65 on the 5? Perhaps I should've used a different analogy. If the thing about gears didn't make sense, and I'm not one who knows, imagine instead that you're listening to No Doubt (the early, fun stuff that most people actually like) and then there's a track of, say, Simon and Garfunkel thrown into the mix. It's not that Art and Paul aren't fantastic, but you had a certain groove going. Or again, maybe you didn't, in which case go back to the first analogy and change it around for yourself so it makes sense. I'm done with this.

The Amazon rating for this book is four and a half stars. And for some reason I'm surprised by this. Not that it isn't good--it is good. But ratings that high usually indicate run-away bestsellers like (pulling a title from a hat, so to speak) The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, which at this moment has 811 customer reviews and was one of the books discussed in Spree. Not to discredit Mr. Hornby's ability to pull in a vast readership, but let's face it, this is a book that hangs out in the Literary Criticism shelf with the likes of Deconstructionalism, probes into the deeper realms of Chaucer, and Harold Bloom. The people who read this book are people who are willing to read a book about books. It's quite possible that there aren't 811 of us around. Especially 811 of us who would want such a book to also be sprinkled with pop culture references and paragraphs like these:

[In So Many Books] Zaid's finest moment...comes in his second paragraph, when he says that "the truly cultured are capable of owning thousands of unread books without losing their composure or their desire for more."

That's me! And you, probablly! That's us! "Thousands of unread books"! "Truly cultured"! .... I suddenly had a little epiphany: all the books we own, both read and unread, are the fullest expression of self we have at our disposal. (pages 124-125)

And yet, here I am, books on the "want" list creeping up on me like kudzu...feeling incredibly guilty for wanting to continue to bite off more than I can read. At the moment, I'm "in the middle of" (which could mean page 5 or page 100) the following books:
The Namesake by Jhumpa Lahiri
Reading Lolita in Tehran by Azar Nafisi
Take the Cannoli by Sarah Vowell
Hypocrite in a Pouffy White Dress by Susan Gilman
Toast by Nigel Slater
Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets by J.K. Rowling
and ELEVEN, I've just counted, other books sitting on my shelves right now with scraps of paper poking out to say "You're not done yet, loser, get back here" that I'm not even going to list because it's been at least six months since I opened them. That's, what? Seventeen books? Do I even have enough time to finish the ones I started--not to mention all the books I wrote papers on in college without ever having read--before something drastic happens and I never read again? John and I want children eventually, after all. Can I finish all these books at the rate I'm going before there's a small child around to neglect so I can not feel illiterate for never having read Dostoevsky, who I don't even own?

Probably not. Because between now and that time, I will have no doubt bought at least 30 more books. That I won't read either.