The Grown-Up

It's unthinkable, to me, what will happen when I run out of books that are on my bookshelf. The Matthew Schratz Pages to Read number is like the national debt: I know, in theory, what it is, but it is inconceivable in practice. For the last year or so, it has fluctuated around 65,000 or 70,000 pages; I don't know how different that number is, bigger or smaller, from the number when I started the list, or the number from a year ago. Today I finished reading Lucky Jim by Kingsley Amis, and the number of pages to read that I own went down by two hundred and fifty one. That represents, liberally, one third of one percent of the pages left on my bookshelf in the "To Read" section, a section built by overzealous purchasing, gift giving, and the (very) occasional reassignment of a book that I've already read and already too much forgotten. That is a lot of pages. It took me about a week to read Lucky Jim; assuming that all of the pages remaining are as easily read (they aren't) and that the number will only decrease (it won't), that means that I will have conquered my library in three hundred weeks, or about six years.

To have read all of one's books: not all of the books one wants to read, or needs to read, or ought to read, but all of the books one has on his bookshelf: that is the prospect I see before me, in six years. In six years I will be thirty years old, which means I will be inescapably a grown-up. And to have finished reading all of my books, in the narrow way I mean, is what I have to look at as a number that makes more sense as the number to tick down until I am a grown-up. I own a copy of A Tale of a Tub that I bought, from amazon.com, in 2002, obsessed with getting as much Swift as I could get my hands on after I read A Modest Proposal in high school. I own a copy of Thoreau's selected essays that I bought at the now long-defunct Waldenbooks in the Lockport Mall. And I own a copy of Decline and Fall that I bought at a used book store in Massachusetts, with long term aims of impressing with my knowledge of it a girl whom I knew, at the time, to be enjoying the Loved One, also by Evelyn Waugh. The point about these books, and many others of their near neighbors, is that I cannot possibly imagine ever self-identifying as a grown-up while they sit there, unread. Like Investing, or Quitting Smoking, Reading All of My Books seems like a task impossibly grown-up, like a thing I couldn't possibly currently do.

And yet, and yet, I finished Lucky Jim today on the Q train, around eleven thirty tonight. So there it went. And I currently want a cigarette about as badly as I can remember, and yet I took off my shoes and brushed my teeth instead of going to the bodega. So there that goes. I will whittle my pages down. Man never is, always to be, blest.