Black Holes and Books

Well, I finally finished Black Holes & Time Warps. Which turned out to be a pretty cool book. I found it particularly interesting to learn that Kip Thorne's research into wormholes and time travel was sparked by a call he got from Carl Sagan asking him for some advice on the scientific details in the novel Contact. There's just something that greatly appeals to me about this example of science and science fiction playing off each other and inspiring each other...

(By the way, in honor of my having finished Thorne's book and of the fact that, as previously mentioned, I am going to the Rush concert in Albuquerque tomorrow, the Official Theme Song of this blog is now "Cygnus X-1." This replaces "Who Needs Sleep?" by the Barenaked Ladies as the current Official Theme Song.)

Interestingly, Black Holes & Time Warps happens to be book #1700 to be entered into my book database. That's a list I keep of all the books I own, which each book entered in as I finish it and place it on the shelf. So it doesn't include the 400 or so books I have but haven't gotten around to reading yet (eep!), or textbooks, or reference books, or other things that I haven't read cover to cover. Meaning, at a rough estimate, I probably have close to 2200 books.

And I never thought I'd hear myself say this, because I never believed such a thing was possible, but I think I may finally have gotten to the point where I have too many books. Even with the database, even with the fact that I have all of them (except for the unread ones) shelved in a moderately orderly system, I'm still getting to the point where I can't keep track of them all any more. A month or two ago, I spent over an hour searching the To-Read Piles for the book I knew I wanted to read next, only to discover, eventually, that I'd never actually bought it. I had the next several books in that series, but I'd somehow missed out on that one without realizing it. About three times now I've picked up a book I already owned because I'd forgotten that I'd bought it once already. And, for almost a year, I thought my copy of The Hobbit had gone missing. A couple of weeks ago, I found it. It'd been shelved in the wrong place, and I was completely incapable of discovering this fact, because I am no longer intimately familiar with my bookshelves. There are simply too many of them any more.

I can't say how much it shocks me to even hear myself think this, but it's starting to occur to me to wonder what I'm hanging on to all these books for. There are a number of reasons for building up such a large collection, but the only one that really seems to hold water, if I examine them objectively, is that I like having books around. I like the look and feel of them and the way they make my house smell. But honestly, 99% of these I have no great desire to re-read, and even the ones I would like to re-read I'm unlikely to actually find the time for, given that I've still got several years worth of books I have yet to read the first time. I used to think that if I ever had children, I'd want them to grow up in a house full of books, but at this point I'm pretty darned sure I'm not going to have children. Being able to lend books out to people is nice, but after a few annoying experiences with getting people to return them, I'm thinking it might be time to re-evaluate my open-library policy in any case. And the idea of having my own home reference library so I could look up any obscure information I might need without leaving home was highly attractive ten years ago, but these days it's almost always easier to look something up on the internet than it is to go searching through my books for it, anyway.

I don't know... I still love having all these books around, but it kind of saddens me to think about the fact that they're mostly all just sitting there, collecting dust. Maybe I just need to spend more quality time with them.