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| Tuesday, January 18, 2005 09:37 AM |
| Mania of a sort |
| by poppy |
I have an addictive personality. I also have the ability to get quite obsessive about things. Both of these traits have gotten me into varying degrees of trouble and torment over the years. These last few weeks, the source of the problem has been books. I finally have time to read things that I want to read as opposed to articles my professors wrote... and I'm not sure what to read.
Do not be mistaken: I have ideas. I'm not that hopeless. The problem is that there are several topics I would love to dive into and read many books about, get some dvds even... but I don't know where to start. I began a book about libraries (a meta-meta book I guess), and the guy described the feeling when he walked into his first day of work at the main Harvard library as something close to pain and despair. When confronted with so much of such interest, however do you choose? Working in a sizable library myself, I have had to come to grips, as the author eventually did, that I will not live long enough to read everything that I want to read, much less everything.
The advice I've been given whenever I bring up my problem with other bibliomaniacs is something akin to the 50 page test: if it doesn't hold you completely in thrall after 50 pages, chuck it. While I don't have a problem walking out of/away from movies (or out of/away from relationships for that matter), I rarely can bring myself to give up on a book. When I used to work in a book warehouse I would get misty-eyed looking at the piles and piles of remainder books. Each one was somebody's baby; someone had spent time and care on it. I felt that they deserved some level of respect, which led to me reading some real crap during my tenure there.
So what's a girl to do? Do I muddle through the wastes of library-land and hope for the best? Do I institute some harsh variant of the 50 page rule? Or do I give myself a strict schedule to follow, because obviously being out of school and having a life is bad for me?
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