My Reading Shelf

As my dissertation sped toward completion, I largely ignored non-academic writing. Instead of doing outside reading, I assembled a “reading shelf,” full of books that I planned to read as soon as the whole thing was over. This project started with perhaps a dozen books, and initially worked well enough. Unfortunately, I never developed any plan of attack, and my shelf has now metastasized.

Indeed, I don’t know how most of the stuff got up there. In the midst of discussing the shelf with a friend last weekend, I realized that I had no idea why I wanted to read many of the books. Cryptonomicon, for sure, and I remember putting David Foster Wallace’s Oblivion up there, but when did I convince myself I was going to read The Decline and Fall of the British Aristocracy, by David Cannadine? The Oxford History of Mexico? World War I is great and all, but do I really need to read The First World War by John Keegan? Haven’t I already read enough about World War II to avoid Julian Jackson’sThe Fall of France? And what is it with this bizarre Roman fetish? I have From Rome to Byzantium by Michael Grant, The Roman Empire and its Germanic Peoples by Herwig Wolfram, and Cicero: The Life and Times of Rome’s Greatest Politician by Anthony Everitt. What’s worse, I bought the last one just a few weeks ago. The whole point of a reading shelf is to attempt to make a dent in the books I already own that I haven’t read. In this aspect I have failed completely; I’ll probably read Anne Norton’s Leo Strauss and the Politics of American Empire after I finish my current book. I also have Philip Roth’s The Plot Against America on the way, which I may, may read before I get to Maurice Keen’s Medieval Warfare: A History. Finally, in an attempt to actually follow through on the promise of the reading shelf, I read that awful book about the Habsburg Empire that rotted my brain.

So, I’m never going to finish the shelf, and I’m probably never even going to reduce it’s size. There are some books that I will never get to. If I had infinite time, I would read all of them. However, I know that I don’t have infinite time, and I should have enough sense not to try to convince myself that I’ll get to them. Has anyone developed a system to deal with problems like these?