August 11th, 2009 / 12:27 pm
Behind the Scenes
The Books I Haven’t Read
Seems like for every book I read, I buy three more. In this way life has quickly become a slowly ascending grid of paper, soon which will hopefully be enough to sell my old house and build a new one, out of words.
Often when I am reading I find it hard to concentrate on a book because of the looming of all the other books in the room waiting their turn. Sometimes I will find myself reading faster, allowing missing, so that I will be more quickly open to the next. I try not to do this, but it is hard, especially with these stacks all looming over.
Here are the stacks in my apartment of the books I have bought within the last year or so (some even just last week) and have not read. These I keep stacked on top of my biggest bookcase, on top of all the ones I actually have found the time for:
Horrifying, no? And yet at the same time beautiful. Sometimes I just go and stand and look at them like a little kid, pick one up, consider it might be its turn, put it back down, find another. Often when I pick a book I think I might read next, or two or three at the same time, I move them over to the arms of my sofa so I will actually see them and remember I decided I wanted to read them next, though just as often there they sit until I get tired of them being in the way and I put them back on the stacks. If I don’t jump in quick and hard, it probably won’t happen.
Strange that most often the books I am currently reading are ones that have just been ordered in the mail. Once one makes it to ‘the stack’ it seems harder for it to get back out again.
Some books, it’s been more than a year, more than two years since I bought them and they still have not been cracked. Some were bought on whims, or gifts, and some I’ve moved 4-5 times from house to house still carrying them in ‘the unread box,’ which is always a little heavier.
Here are two of my smaller bookshelves, each assigned to hold the books I’ve had for a year or longer and not read yet, which stand on either side of my longest sofa.
Many of the books here I’ve seriously probably had three or five years or more. Some of them are hardbacks I bought excitedly on the day of the book’s release and never thereafter cracked. Some are galleys I really wanted to read and just couldn’t find the time (my pile of galleys is a whole other picture, one that would require collaging of all the ends of my house and my parents’ house, and more). Some are actually, I’m realizing, transplants, like Laird Hunt’s Ray of the Star, which I read a couple weeks ago and got huge kicks out of, and Lee Klein’s (old school!) Incidents of Ecotourism in the Temporary World, which I read way back in the day and thought I’d lost until taking this picture right now. I need to sort. Some were books I tried to read and gave up on, and yet have not had the heard to get rid of.
Why have I not yet found time for Impossible Object? The Obscene Bird of Night? Color of Darkness? Why have I read every Barry Hannah but Hey Jack!?
Why are books I feel sure I’ve read, and yet can’t fully remember (The End of the Story, The Story of the Eye) stacked along with books I know I likely never will?
What is going to happen?
Obviously: more books, more books, more books.
Where does time go? When does one read?
What do other people do with what they haven’t read? With ARCs and ARCs and ARCs?
What on earth is going on?
Tags: bookcase, books i haven't read
I have the same problem, except I have access to a university library, so I always have a giant stack of library books I want to read. Because it’s too easy to go to the library intending to get one or two books and instead get fifteen. Why not? And then I get home and it’s like, what should I read first? I better hurry up, look at that giant stack of things I want to read!
Sorry, I have no solutions. Just consolation.
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all i have of stuff is in one big backpack and one small backpack so my pile of books to read consists of one book that i recently acquired somehow or a book i’ve recently finished and keep reading anyway because i haven’t acquired another. i should mention that i live in a country where it’s hard to get books in english and also i don’t realy seem to have an address that i’m at long enough to get something delivered
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August 11th, 2009 / 8:57 pmLandon—
where do you live?
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what’s esp. embarrassing to me is when the unread/read ratio gets high w/in a particular author. just lent my brother europe central (of which i’ve read maybe 80 pp.) leaving a mere 1200 or so pages of unread vollmann on my shelf (ice shirt, riding to anywhere and half of fathers and cs) which means i’ve now read more than i haven’t of what’s on display, so: less shame!
plus side, blake, you only really need to read one (1) of those copies of “ever”
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August 11th, 2009 / 1:42 pmBlake Butler—
vollman makes that ratio unbeatable pretty much every year, no matter how much you’ve read of his. “here’s another 1500 page book, yo” one day i will read them all.
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terrible, terrible admission: as the Monkeybicycle web editor, i once rejected a—on second, third, fourth, fifth, sixth, etc reading—greg mulcahy story.
if greg mulcahy reads this: still hurts.
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August 11th, 2009 / 1:43 pmBlake Butler—
sinner
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August 12th, 2009 / 12:43 pmMatthew Simmons—
I know! I know! I know!
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August 12th, 2009 / 10:14 amjensen—
heh. sinner indeed.
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August 12th, 2009 / 12:43 pmMatthew Simmons—
I know! I know!
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also, waiting for the world to end so i can get to all the books in my apartment.
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I thought I invented the idea of the “unread books box” (accidentally typed “undead books box”) during the packing I started a couple of days ago. Moving feels great–packing unread books, I realized that they’re only 1/4 of my total book mass. That’s much less than I’d thought. AWP was the source of most of them. We have three unreads in common.
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August 11th, 2009 / 1:41 pmBlake Butler—
hehe. undead books. i like it.
1/4th seems a good #, that’s probably about where i am, maybe closer to a third. yoink.
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this is good, all is good
you have the essential zizek collection! i’m jealous. buying…
my bookshelf is huge and 80% unread. oh, one bookshelf. i have two. they are both ceiling high and full.
boooooooooooooooooks (boooooooooooooooooks) books.
yes: ‘Strange that most often the books I am currently reading are ones that have just been ordered in the mail. Once one makes it to ‘the stack’ it seems harder for it to get back out again.’
it seems i have 3 or 4 going/being read at once, too. do you do the same thing? i find the best books consume me though, and i read them straight through… although, the most formative books in my life have been confined; bought at an airport, with no access to any other books, or reading one checked out from a school library, i.e. One At A Time
reading theory. seriously.
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August 11th, 2009 / 2:20 pmBlake Butler—
i think mostly i read one at a time. sometimes i let it spread a little, but i like to be done with one before i go on to the other, so as to keep the move.
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If you read my book I’ll cut you!–I’ll cut I will!
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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_Enough_at_Last
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you could read that Harmony Korine fanzine collection in like fifteen minutes, and feel super distraught for twice as long, and then keep going.
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August 11th, 2009 / 4:50 pmBlake Butler—
that one i have been peeking at here and there, when the feeling hits. it should be on the sofa arm. transferring now. :)
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i carry little piles of books around. if i am going to read. i will grab three or four books and carry them to the chair and then decide which book to read.
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“Sometimes I just go and stand and look at them like a little kid, pick one up, consider it might be its turn, put it back down, find another. Often when I pick a book I think I might read next, or two or three at the same time, I move them over to the arms of my sofa so I will actually see them and remember I decided I wanted to read them next, though just as often there they sit until I get tired of them being in the way and I put them back on the stacks.”
Yes.
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this isn’t helpful, but you really should take DECREATION down off the shelf for a minute and at least just read LOTS OF GUNS (pgs. 105-115).
i keep ~30 unread books on my nighttable and read them all at once. or start them all, anyway. then, once a year, i sell the ones i don’t feel compelled to finish. it’s a really bad system because they’re always falling on me.
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August 11th, 2009 / 4:26 pmBlake Butler—
i will do that k, i like that title
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Blake man… this is just plain sexy.
I think we may have to kiss in a very heterosexual way.
On the lips.
Lots of tongue.
And a lil ass grabbing.
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August 11th, 2009 / 4:26 pmBlake Butler—
ass grabbin
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I don’t recommend it, but what I do is read about 15 books at once. It might be even more than that at the moment. The only rule is not to read two books by the same author at the same time. Things really get confusing.
The main downside to my method is that it often takes a year (4.5 years and counting in the case of Gravity’s Rainbow) to make it all the way through any one book. The upside of this downside is that the world of the book seems ever more expansive when you live in it for months or years.
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I just purchased a new five shelf bookcase to house my unread books.
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What I can’t work out for the life of me, as much as I sympathize with the problem in general, is how you can possibly have not read Jimmy Corrigan when you apparenlty own a copy.
Listen to me: you want to read that book. You want it bad.
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August 11th, 2009 / 5:20 pmBlake Butler—
i’ve read most of it. i am bad at reading comix mainly.
that one in particular is brutally sad
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August 11th, 2009 / 5:40 pmMike Meginnis—
It is indeed one of the saddest things you could possibly read. I read once that Chris Ware has a set of maxims hung over his desk, the most important being “Value your own worthlessness.”
I found that beautiful and liberating. But it does hurt.
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August 11th, 2009 / 5:40 pmreynard seifert—
i concur that you should read jimmy corrigan, blake. it’s the ulysses of graphic novels. there’s a very small detail on one particularly intense diagram that i think a lot people miss, and consequently misinterpret the crux of the novel, which concerns issues of race. it’s a really beautiful book; there’s nothing like it.
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August 11th, 2009 / 5:43 pmMike Meginnis—
Reynard — I’m curious what you mean. Would love you to explain. E-mail’s mike.meginnis@gmail.com if you don’t want to risk a derail.
August 11th, 2009 / 5:48 pmlash—
ulysses of graphic novels? don’t think so. only because that would be impossible and the analogy is lame. it’s like when basketball sportscasters always talk about how this “nba finals game is like ali vs. frazier.” no, dude, no it’s not. ten guys throwing a ball through a hoop is not the same as getting punched in the face over and over again. jimmy corrigan is a fucking great graphic novel, the ulysses of graphic novels it ain’t. cuz nothing is. it’s the jimmy corrigan of graphic novels.
August 11th, 2009 / 6:34 pmreynard seifert—
yes, the jimmy corrigan of graphic novels is a much better analogy.
We have a lot of the same books! Alphabet Man!? Really. Me too.
Oh–and I found it weird that a book you blurbed (Chelsea Martin’s) is on one of these stacks. You have some splaining to do. Hahaha.
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August 11th, 2009 / 8:57 pmBlake Butler—
heh, that’s my 2nd copy. also on that stack are copies of no colony and my books. so, that’s the luv pile?
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hey read Cohen’s A Heaven of Others. It will please you deeply.
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just for the records: haut.
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August 12th, 2009 / 11:36 amBlake Butler—
i feel knighted
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first off: i am jealous that all of your books appear to be new. the only books i’ve been able to afford in the last three years have been used (often extremely used), with very few exceptions. i have not bought a single “new” book myself all year, though I am going to allow the exception next paycheck to buy the newest Evenson b/c 2009 releases are hard to get through Inter-Library Loan & I don’t feel like waiting.
secondly: i have a comparable number of unread books. i also managed to read a library book for every book of my own i read, which halves the pace of my progress. tripticks has been sitting on an “unread” shelf for a while, but I finally cracked it open a few days ago. despite having started and finished four different books since then, I can insist that it’s pretty good.
third: if it helps, the harm zines take about an hour to read.
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I buy new books and they sit around in stacks, and if they don’t get read quickly enough, they migrate to my bookshelves and get mixed in with the things that have already been read. I have a lot of books, but probably only maybe 20 or that are unread, and a lot of those have been purchased just in the past few months or so. I try really hard to read what I buy, but then I start to panic when I run low on unread books and I stock up again.
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How do you even find time to read at all? Between the blogs and the web journals and writing and eating and showering and sweeping up the scattered glass in kitchen after the party you just threw? etc. etc. I guess I’m just wondering how you balance it all.
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August 12th, 2009 / 10:49 amdavid erlewine—
that’s exactly what i’m thinking. i barely make time to write anything, let alone read anywhere close to what most “writers” (not using that term ironically…just to indicate i don’t really consider myself one) on here do. i know i should read more. when i read “Dear Somebody” it was a feeling people on here get perpetually…an awe-inspiring need to write. i guess i read a shitload of very short fiction on all sorts of places but i just don’t buy the BOOKS like folks here. partly i guess i can barely pay my jackassic mortgage…so there’s that.
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August 12th, 2009 / 11:37 amBlake Butler—
landon, heh, freelancing for a living helps, esp when u have a tidy contract. :)
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dear everybody
see, this is why i ban(ned) myself from posting on here. there’s some tic i have. can’t write one fucking post without a big blunder.
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[...] The books I haven’t read [...]
[...] I could use some help. I have a lot of books to choose from. If you feel like it, take a peek at the books I haven’t read, and make suggestions which ones should come along in my [...]
Jean Genet. Our Lady of the Flowers.
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We’re all with you…trust me….we’re all with you on the same paper boat :)
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