gateway to dignity

Throughout my life, I seem to have accumulated a number of books. It's not a staggering collection by any means, but they do set off a room nicely. I get books as gifts, I inherit them from relatives, and of course I buy them. And I am someone who finds it important to always be reading something, even if I'm not the most diligent reader. For instance, I'm reading Irvine Welsh's Glue at work right now, and even as I type this I realize that I've left it at work again for my set of days off, which is the problem. I only get to read it at work, on my breaks. I'm about a hundred and fifty pages into it. It has taken me a month to get that far.

I come into possession of books far more frequently than I finish reading them. My book collection is fast becoming a leering league of strangers, rather than an army of cherished friends. William Faulkner's Absalom, Absalom in particular is one book that's been proffering an unpleasant countenance at me since we first met when I was just a wee kid. Now there's hordes of others, waiting to do battle, like one of those gangs in that Walter Hill movie The Warriors. What a good movie that was: so absolutely without any sense of its own ridiculousness.

Well, the time has come to do battle. My New Year's resolution: to read fifty books this year. Tomorrow I am going to go round and pick out fifty of my unread volumes and make a pile of them someplace obnoxiously obtrusive, and one by one I am going to read them all in 2005. A book a week, with a little nudge room. Can I make it? Cue up "Eye of the Tiger" and watch me!