I have the capacity to buy more books in one week than I could ever hope to read in a year. That, of course, does not include the literally hundreds of books I already have at home. The problem is, I have never felt guilty buying a book. Not even when I browsed used bookstores as a dirt poor college student knowing that any book buying that day was going to require asking my parents for food money later in the month. I always bought the book. This has caused tremendous hardship over the years. For instance, no one wants to help me move (which I have done several times), I have limited space for any other possessions and the dust that settles cozily inside the spine of the jacketcover makes my lungs seize up on a regular basis when dusting.

But the most difficult of all are all those books just sitting there waiting to be read. This is a picture of my "summer" reading bookshelf. You will soon see why summer is in quotes. The titles on this bookshelf include the following:

100 Years of Solititude-Marquez
You Can't Go Home Again- Thomas Wolfe
A Room of One's Own- Virginia Woolf
The World Is Flat- Thomas Friedman
A collection of short stories by Richard Ford
My Life--Bill Clinton
The Bostonians- Henry James (Washington Square is also on the shelf)
Othello-Shakespeare (I have read it, but my roommate assigned it as summer reading to her students and I couldn't resist reading it again with them)
The Tibetan Book of the Living and the Dead
Reframing Organizations- a book on leadership
Name All the Animals- a memoir of a woman who loses her only sibling when she is still a teen herself
A Thread of Grace- Russell
A book on Amish Society (I was recently in Pennsylvania and became fascinated)
Coast of Dreams- a historical account of Ca by Kevin Starr, the recent librarian for the State of CA...I got to see Mr. Starr speak recently at a leadership conference and was taken by his perspective of Ca lifestyle
Going After Cacciato- Tim O'Brien
The Big Book of Photography

Of course, this shelf does not include the books that I am currently reading (I tend to read 3-4 at a time because you never know what your going to be in the mood to read, and heck, there are so many of them!) The "summer" part of the bookshelf is in quotes because how can I possibly read all of these books during the summer? So the name of this bookshelf migrates with the seasons...soon, it will be the "autumn" bookshelf and I will add some basketball themed titles to the shelves. Hopefully I will have subtracted a few by then as well. The irony is that I can now afford all the books I want, but the job that pays for them also takes time and energy. My solution to that? Buy more books!...and keep reading. So today, I bought what looks like three excellent choices. One is about a Harvard-educated guy that became a cop for the NYPD, another is about a doctor that is changing lives in Haiti and a third is about the odd and traditional world of horse racing...I am making room for them on my shelves right now...