Always More Books

Over at About Last Night, Our Girl in Chicago, writing about facing the unenviable task of tossing 300 precious tomes, presents a compelling picture of book-mania (which is pretty similar, I suspect, to DVD mania and CD mania, both of which I know a bit about). Here's a snippet:

For now, a general observation. I was a graduate student in English for many years but have not been for a little more than a year now. When you're a graduate student—especially if you're me—you buy books very nearly indiscriminately from new and used bookstores. You pick up free books from the box outside Powell's or a box left outside a faculty office. You go to the annual library sale and go a little nuts. You must have books. Wanting to read a book is not a necessary condition for buying it; merely anticipating wanting to read it at some undesignated time in the future will do.

For one thing, having the right books gives you a sense of belonging and being in the know. More substantially, there's almost nothing you can't imagine possibly, somehow, at some point, helping you with your research, if you only have it at hand at the right time. (Actually, this outlook explains a lot about why my dissertation was doomed. There's never not something else you can and should read, there's always important stuff you don't know.) Buying books added hope and subtracted anxiety. I hadn't read a certain Raymond Williams book? That was bad. But merely buying the book, I discovered, made me feel halfway better. When my unfamiliarity with the material became a real roadblock, there it would be, readable on the spot. This, folks, is the way to amass a truly unmanageable and largely unread library.