I’m a book hoarder.
I lust after Penguin modern classics, their evocative black and white illustrations, their signature light blue binding, their elegant typeface.
I covet NYRB’s chic minimalist editions and fanatically collect their colorful spines.
If I have a free day, the first thing I’ll do is explore a bookstore or library. I love used bookshops because they have a sense of weight, a sense of history. Secondhand books possess a dusty perfume; their pages are soft with age.
Sometimes they have annotations, meditations and musings transcribed in soft graphite. In an old copy of Jane Eyre I stumbled upon at Recycled Books on the Alameda, I find a map of the former owner’s mind. Character names are boxed, key words are circled, significant passages are marked with squiggly lines. On pg. 14, Mrs. Reed’s command to take Miss Eyre to the “red room” and “lock her in there” are intensely underlined.
Other times, secondhand books contain a personal inscription from the previous owner. One time I bought a copy of Billy Collins’ Poetry 180 from a local thrift store and found a heartfelt handwritten note on the back of a bright red Rothko postcard (“Adam, There is less time these days but time enough for poetry…I am grateful for Collins’ gift but more so for your visit– John”).
Over the years, I’ve collected hundreds (let’s be honest, thousands) of tattered treasures from used bookstores. Each volume is a portal to a person I once was.
Voyage on the Great Titanic: The Diary of Margaret Ann Brady reminds me of the shy 8 year old who loved to slip into other selves, who found in books refuge from her chaotic upbringing.
My copy of The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath still has a prominent place on my shelf. A bright-eyed Sylvia looks radiant in a cardigan and silk scarf, a white carnation on the bottom left hand corner. I’ve had this edition for close to twenty years, since I was 17. The cherished volume reminds me of my angsty teenage self, my dogged disdain for convention and my earnest (and occasionally embarrassing) attempts at poetry.
The cloud-covered Penguin edition of Alain De Botton’s Art of Travel transports me to the place I first bought it, on an autumn trip to Santorini. I remember reading the first chapter over an Aperol spritz on a windswept terrace, the pink-orange sun melting into the Aegean sea.
Throughout my life, my books have been my constant companions. They’re how I remain on nodding terms with who I used to be.
My bookshelf is a museum of thought, of all the ideas that once stirred me.
Some of my books are brown-edged and dogeared, beloved favorites I’ve read once, sometimes several times.
Others have been sitting unread on my shelves for years.
After seeing some of my favorite BookTokers count the unread books on their TBR, I decided to take stock of my stack of shame.
My total?
225.
I was shocked.
Before my little library inventory, I was like a shopaholic who refuses to look at her credit card bill. I only had a vague sense I had a lot of books collecting dust—now I had a concrete number in indisputable black and white. I was overcome with guilt.
My book-collecting habit had outpaced my ability to actually read. Because of my thrift addiction, I might bring home 3 or 4 books a week–far more than I could actually read in the same time frame.
Now sitting among my teetering towers of uncracked spines, I felt overwhelmed and ashamed.
My TBR glared at me judgmentally.
Was I Gatsby—that epitome of self-invention—whose exhaustive library only gives the impression of being educated? If you’re unfamiliar with the titan of American Literature from high school English, the nouveau rich Gatsby is obsessed with being accepted by the sophisticated upper classes. Though Gatsby has a leather-scented library lined with hundreds of books, Owl Eyes exposes his library as a sham. His books are uncut, therefore, unread.
Was I no better than Gatsby?
Was I an impostor in the world of the intellect?
Was my library an elaborate charade, a way only to seem worldly and well-read?
In his paradigm-shifting essay,“All Those Books You’ve Bought But Haven’t Read? There’s a Word for That,” Kevin Mims argues an ever expanding library isn’t something to be ashamed of–in fact, it should be a source of pride. The too enthusiastic book collector buys too many books because they have a ceaseless curiosity, an insatiable intellectual appetite.
Adding books to your to-read shelf suggests there’s still more to know. Each yet-to-be-read book represents a sea to a faraway land, a route to the not-yet-known.
The real tragedy would be to stop buying books.
No longer adding books to your TBR would be tantamount to declaring there’s no more to learn.
As Mims writes, “A person’s library is often a symbolic representation of his or her mind. A man who has quit expanding his personal library may have reached the point where he thinks he knows all he needs to and that what he doesn’t know can’t hurt him. He has no desire to keep growing intellectually. The man with an ever-expanding library understands the importance of remaining curious, open to new ideas and voices.”
Most argue there are only two categories of books: the read and the unread. But Mims makes the case there’s a third category: the partially read.
These are the books we dip into, abandon, return to, revisit. The ones we read in fragments: anthologies, diaries, letters, poetry collections. They’re not meant to be consumed cover to cover in a linear fashion; they invite us to savor them slowly over time and serendipitously turn to random pages.
As a pathologically goal-oriented, Type A personality, I get unparalleled pleasure from crossing items off my to do list. I’m a finisher: I like reaching objectives. Too often, I’m less concerned with the actual act of climbing the mountain than reaching the summit.
Occasionally, I bring this joyless sense of obligation to my reading life. I prioritize reading books I can check off my to read list rather than mammoth tomes I can never hope to finish. Though I’ve been out of school for over a decade, the eager-to-please student in me still wants the A, the gold star of recognition.
But is the goal of reading simply to finish?
I’ll probably never finish all 674 pages of The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath but that doesn’t mean it hasn’t expanded my understanding of the world and enlarged my spirit.
History abounds with unrepentant book hoarders.
Karl Lagerfeld had a colossal library of 300,000 books.
At the end of his life, Ernest Hemingway had 9,000. The shameless bookworm constantly acquired new books, sometimes as many as 200 in a single year.
Though dismissed as a dumb blonde, Marilyn Monroe had an impressive collection of 400 volumes across many genres: art, poetry, philosophy, history and biography. Because she never had a formal college education (she dropped out of high school to get married), Monroe cherished books, collecting first editions of Jack Kerouac’s On the Road and Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man.
Did Miss Marilyn read every single page of every single one of her 400 books?
Probably not.
Lagerfeld certainly didn’t (unless he read 3,529.41 books every year since he was born until his death).
Should they be ashamed of this fact?
Of course not; as Robert Browning once wrote, “a man’s reach should exceed his grasp.”
A towering TBR is a sign of a striving soul, a curious intellect.
My TBR spans a wide range of subjects: the rise of AI and algorithms, long dead literary figures, Victorian ghost stories, contemporary Italian literature, rain forests, rivers, global warming, the homeless crisis, mass incarceration, the Manson family, the iconic Chateau Marmont, existential philosophy.
I used to think my endlessly expanding TBR was a sign of unforgivable inadequacy—irrefutable evidence that I was, yet again, falling behind. But perhaps it’s a hopeful symbol, a sign there are still intellectual mountains left to climb. I might never finish all my books but maybe that’s the point. You never turn the final page of a well-read life.
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