the tyranny of the to-read pile

[realthog]

Sam Jordison tells it like it is in The Guardian. Here's a slice, but the whole piece is worth reading:

Each book on my overloaded pending shelf comes with its own unconvincing reason as to why I can't quite manage it yet and am going to buy the new Paul Auster instead. Chief among my tormentors is Thomas Pynchon's Against the Day. There's no ignoring it, because it's so big. Indeed, owing to the fact that my shelves are right next to my bed, it's pretty much the last thing I see before I go to sleep and the first thing I see when I wake up. And I have no reason not to read it other than its size. I know I'll enjoy it, but, you see, I need to know I'm going to have a good month or so at home before I make a start. It's just too heavy to go on holiday or assignment and I'm also worried that taking it in a bag will break the spine. (And in case you're thinking I should just interrupt my reading for a few days, I can't. It's Pynchon. Losing the thread could get me completely lost.)

I'm similarly haunted by a copy of The Spire by William Golding. My failure here is made even more irksome because when I picked the book up (three years ago) in the lovely Priestpopple Books in Hexham the man behind the till laughed at me and said: "Good luck with that." He clearly didn't know what kind of an intellectual giant he was dealing with, I thought, as I pocketed it. I intended to munch it within a week – and enjoy it. But since then, I've found that the splashes of turquoise on the cover have put me off. It's really not a colour I like.

And so it goes – through Richard Yates' Revolutionary Road (I'm saving that for a trip to the US), to Joseph Roth's What I Saw (too depressing for winter) via Umberto Eco's The Island Of The Day Before (it's a trade paperback; I hate those) …