Eleven Books And I Opened Two

You counted them for the first time on Sunday.

They have been beside your bed for a long while, in a stack, and you have moved them to hoover round them and put a glass on top of them and taken things off the top and put them back. And on Sunday, for no reason you can identify, you counted.

Eleven. And you have opened two.

And the counting produced something, which is why you have not thought about it comfortably since. Not guilt exactly. A sort of low accusation that arrives whenever your eye goes to that corner of the room.

I want to work on that stack, and I want to say at the start what I am not going to suggest.

I am not going to tell you to get rid of them.

That is what most advice about this comes to eventually, dressed up as clearing space or being honest with yourself about what you will actually read. And it is the wrong instruction, because the pile is not the problem, and taking it away would remove the evidence without touching the thing that is bothering you.

And I am not going to tell you to read them faster.

What I want to do is much simpler, which is to ask what you were actually doing on each of the eleven days you bought one of those.

Because something happened on each of those days, and it was not a promise, and you have been treating it as one.

Of making many books there is no end

There is a line near the end of Ecclesiastes that sounds weary and turns out to be a relief.

And further, by these, my son, be admonished: of making many books there is no end; and much study is a weariness of the flesh. (Ecclesiastes 12:12, King James Version)

Of making many books there is no end.

That is a statement about supply, and it was written a very long time before anybody had a bedside stack.

There is no end. Not a great many. Not more than you could get through. No end, which means the set is not finishable, and was not finishable then, and has never been finishable by anybody at any point in history.

And notice the second half, because it is the part that lets you off: much study is a weariness of the flesh.

That is a plain acknowledgment that reading has a cost. It is not free, it takes something out of a person, and there is a limit to how much of it anybody can do. That is said without disapproval and without any suggestion that a better person would have more capacity.

So put those two together and look at your stack.

The supply is infinite and your capacity is finite. That is not a description of your failure; it is the condition of being a person who is interested in things. Every reader who has ever lived has died with a pile beside the bed, including people who read all day for a living.

The pile is not a backlog. A backlog implies a queue that could in principle be cleared, and there is no such queue, and there never was.

The supply has never once been finishable, and a pile beside a bed has never once been a backlog. Ecclesiastes 12:12 puts no end on the making of books and calls the study itself wearying, and the Holy Spirit is the one who lets a person look at a stack without being accused by it.

What each of those days actually was

Here is the practical part, and it is a reframing that should hold for the rest of your life.

Think about the actual moment each of those came home.

You were in a shop, or somebody mentioned one, or you read something about it, and something in you lit up slightly. You thought: I would like to know about that. Or: that is the sort of thing I want to be thinking about. And you bought it.

What happened in that moment was real. Something in you reached toward a subject, and you did a small concrete thing about it, and the reaching was genuine whether or not you have since read page nine.

That is what the stack is a record of. Eleven separate occasions on which you were interested in something and acted on it.

You have been reading it as eleven broken promises instead.

And that reading is not neutral, because it teaches you something about buying the twelfth. A person who experiences their unread books as accusations gradually stops acquiring them, and what dies is not the pile, it is the reaching, and the reaching was the good part.

So the risk here is not that the stack grows. It is that you stop being somebody whose eye lights up in a shop.

I would keep the stack.

Each one of those was a genuine reaching toward something, and it has never once been a promise you broke. The written word sets no end to the books and no shame on the limits of a person, and the Spirit of God is the one who is present where a stack stops accusing anybody.

Take one off and put it where you sit

So here is the assignment, and it is a change of location rather than of intention.

Take one book off the pile and put it somewhere you will actually sit.

One. And not the one you think you ought to read, which is probably the most improving of the eleven and is why it has been in the stack for two years. Take the one you actually want, which you will identify in about three seconds if you are honest.

And move it out of the bedroom.

That is the whole mechanism. A stack by the bed is read at the one moment of the day when you have least left, and the books in it are therefore competing for the worst ten minutes you own. No wonder two of eleven.

Put it where you sit in the daytime. The arm of the chair you sit in with coffee. The kitchen table. Beside where you eat lunch. Somewhere your body already stops for a few minutes without being exhausted.

A book that lives where you sit gets read in the pockets of the day, and the pockets are where your actual reading capacity is, and you have been ignoring them entirely because reading felt like an evening activity.

And leave the other ten exactly where they are. This is not the beginning of clearing the stack. The stack is fine. It is a record of eleven days on which you were interested in something, and it can stay.

You are able to move one book to where your capacity actually is, and the worst ten minutes of the day has never once been where reading was going to happen. Ecclesiastes 12:12 admits the weariness plainly, and the Holy Spirit is the one present with somebody carrying one book out of a bedroom.