The Unread Books

In 1981 I joined a mail-order book club. It was the kind where you had to order five or six books a year at the list price. To entice you to cough up the money, they sent half-a-dozen free titles—of their choosing.

Forty years later I can’t recall what the other freebies were, but for sure I remember one of them:

Gone With The Wind, by Margaret Mitchell.

It’s still sitting on one of my book shelves. And I still haven’t read it.

This morning I sat down and figured out how many times I’ve moved to a new address in those forty years. The answer is twelve.

Twelve times I’ve boxed that thing up and hauled it to a new home. The thing isn’t dainty, either; it’s a thick, heavy hardback, about 740 pages.

To me this epitomizes our sometimes-irrational love affair with books. Some of us collect them regardless of whether we’ve read them or not. I know damned well that Mitchell’s epic novel of the Civil War is a beloved classic, so I’m fine having it take up shelf real estate.

How many others have I carted around that are unread? Of the hundreds of titles, I’d guesstimate about 10%. That includes books that were gifts (in other words, picked out by someone else), and Ulysses, by James Joyce.

I mean, c’mon—I’m not a masochist.

Yet whether they’ve been read or not, there are two arguments I see for keeping every one of them: They’re essentially artwork, and someday I might crack them open.

In the meantime, they’ll continue to be my companions. Unless I’m lugging them around in boxes, they still bring me joy.

And who knows? One day I might whittle the number down to 5%.