Lisa, yes is right. Not only is Walt’s comment worthy of a guest post (as Matt suggested) but I think there’s a novel in there too.

Well, Tricia, 41. That takes you to Mary Gordon’s Good Boys and Dead Girls on my stack, right at the bottom of the light switch.

Some of the books in this stack have been here since 199o. Nicholson Baker’s Room Temperature, for example.

In order to make room for new books, every once in a while, I’ll go through and give away the books I’ve lost interest in for one reason or another before I could read them. So many books and so little time…

Walt-if I hadn’t seen your paintings, I’d say you’d chosen the wrong profession. And but so you wield your words as deftly as the brush, painting a picture here of the boy who loved books. How wonderful of your young mother to give you books and the time and space to read them.

I love how you bring your TBR piles to life in the last part of your comment:

Quietly tolerating having been overlooked yet again in favor of some new interloper. Or even coiled sneakily on the edge of a table, ready to leap into my hands…

Thanks for taking the time to share this piece of your life.

Kimberly-Yes, ouch. The old pile has gotten a little out of hand. I love audio books as well, and Lauren Roberts just wrote a wonderful essay on “The Voice of a Book.”

Mireille-I do love the “friend” aspect of books, curling up with one on the sofa, returning to the voice of an author we know or a character we’ve read before. Thanks for your comment!

Alright Matt! That’s it! You’re shut off ! You put Vasko Popa and Peter Bayard on my teetering pile in one day. :))

“Our relation to books is a shadowy space haunted by the ghosts of memory, and the real value of books lies in their ability to conjure these specters.”

Books were a life line when I was a little kid. The environment I grew up in was…well…Dickensian, I guess. I’ll spare you the gruesome details. But buried in that experience somewhere is a moment when books became talismans for me. More than just bearers of stories and information, they were magical charms w/ the power to transport me to a better place. My mom, who was 15 yrs. old when I was born, was a bright girl trapped by circumstance and bad choices. But she was obsessed w/ having me read for some reason. I think I had a TBR pile of ragged used books scavenged from church rummage sales and the town dump practically before I could even walk.And she would let me skip the hideous bus ride home from school every day so I could walk 2 miles to the public library and commune w/ books.I’d save a little bit of my lunch in a mauled and re-used brown paper bag and stay there well past “normal people’s” dinner hour. She would eventually come around to pick me up in her wheezing old rust-bucket, coughing the acrid blue smoke of burnt oil.I didn’t realize until much later that she was also buying me a little peace, and a chance to avoid at least a portion of the horrendous things that were going on at home. And but so books have been my constant companions ever since. My ticket out of the rat-hole, and my introduction to the series of virtual mentors who would stand in for the father I never met. Some are stacked in neat, worshipful rows the way Catholics stack candles. Others are scattered about in manically skewed piles awaiting their turn. Quietly tolerating having been overlooked yet again in favor of some new interloper. Or even coiled sneakily on the edge of a table, ready to leap into my hands in a fit of Jungian synchronicity at precisely the right moment. And, like Matt said, some almost literally following me around the house!

Cynthia,

(Like that shelf! I also see you also have The Life of Pi on your TBR pile!) I enjoyed Bastable’s essay; reminds me of the quip, “Shakespeare? Pah! Nothing but clichés!” I was lucky that Infinite Jest was only on my TBR pile briefly, as I had picked it up only a few months before Infinite Summer took off.

Piscivorous, I also meant to add that Infinite Jest used to sit at the very bottom of this stack, down there where Woman is now, which gives me hope that I will eventually get to all of them.

Dory-This photo was made possible only because of my new camera that takes panoramic shots! And as I said to Piscivorous, it makes me feel much more in control of the situation to have all the books I want to read in one spot.

Emily-Overwhelmed is a much better word than guilty and more accurate from my standpoint. I am always impressed with your wide-ranging selection of books prompted at least in part by your reading challenges. It will be interesting to see what you choose with fewer of those.

I also wanted to recommend Mark Bastable’s very funny essay in Bibliobuffet on reading choices, “Is This the Line for Faulkner’s latest?” Here’s the link: http://www.bibliobuffet.com/content/view/1127/194/.