My Year of Reading: The Unreads

For the past few years, December has filled me with dread, despair and the kind of anguish that can only be shared by a kid whose parents take him to a candy store after the dentist has wired his jaw shut.  Cruel parents, you say?  Well, yes, but that's also how I feel about all the clocks and calendars that funnel and compress and chop my days into bite-size pieces.  You see, I have a problem--one which faces any obsessive-compulsive reader like me: too many books, too little time.  It's the cry of lament heard everywhere from Twitter to public libraries.

Books are my delight, but the tick of the clock is my enemy.

As a blogger and book collector (you say "hoarder," I say "collector"), I take in far more books than I could ever possibly read, not only in a year but in a lifetime.  If you visit my house, you'll have to pick your way through stacks and stacks of trade paperbacks, piled haphazard and teetering, and tiptoe past swaying columns of hardcovers that could come crashing down upon your head with just one soft cough.  My dear wife, God bless her, tries to maintain a neat and lovely home, but her decorating taste is thwarted by sights like this

and this

(actual, candid shots which I took just minutes ago).  And that's not even counting the hundreds of e-books which obesely fill the limits of my Kindle.

Sure, some of these books are ones whose spines I know I'll never crack.  But there are many, many, many titles in my collection that I really, really, really want to read.  Right now.

So, every December I lace up my running shoes, get into the starting blocks, tense my leg muscles, and make a mad, Olympic-style, arms-flailing sprint to the finish line of the year (only to keep jogging around the track in January, of course).  It's a futile dash in a neverending loop--sort of like running on an escalator in an M. E. Escher lithograph.  Apart from the two books I'm wrapping up this week (Back to Blood by Tom Wolfe and The Liberator by Alex Kershaw), I know of only two other books I might be able to finish before New Year's Eve: Misfit by Adam Braver and Hollywood Unknowns: A History of Extras, Bit Players, and Stand-Ins by Anthony Slide which I'm reading for research purposes as I work on my next novel, Dubble.  If I'm lucky, I'll also be able to squeeze in one book each by Agatha Christie and Louis L'Amour--an annual tradition of finishing off the year with a couple of light palate-pleasers by these two authors.

But behind me stretches a long line of books I wish I'd read in 2012.  This is only a partial list of titles sitting in those life-threatening to-be-read piles (my sincerest apologies to all those authors and publicists whose books I said I'd try to read this year; all I can say is, my ambition was bigger than my allotted hours):

The Rules of Inheritance: A Memoir by Claire Bidwell Smith
The Book of Jonas by Stephen Dau
Cascade by Maryanne O’Hara
Drift: The Unmooring of American Military Power by Rachel Maddow
The Watch by Joydeep Roy-Bhattacharya
The Long Walk: A Story of War and the Life That Follows by Brian Castner
Let's Pretend This Never Happened: (A Mostly True Memoir) by Jenny Lawson
Battleborn by Claire Vaye Watkins
Wild by Cheryl Strayed
Faith Bass Darling's Last Garage Sale by Lynda Rutledge
Monarch Beach by Anita Hughes
The Lighthouse Road by Peter Geye
John Saturnall's Feast by Lawrence Norfolk
The People of Forever Are Not Afraid by Shani Boianjiu
Cataclysm Baby by Matt Bell
Night Swim by Jessica Keener
Hand Me Down by Melanie Thorne
Wilderness by Lance Weller
What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank: Stories by Nathan Englander
Beautiful Ruins by Jess Walter
Talulla Rising by Glen Duncan
The Twelve by Justin Cronin
The Map of My Dead Pilots: The Dangerous Game of Flying in Alaska by Colleen Mondor
The Crown by Nancy Bilyeau
What Happened to Sophie Wilder? by Christopher Beha
Hemingway's Girl by Erika Robuck
Behind the Beautiful Forevers: Life, Death, and Hope in a Mumbai Undercity by Katherine Boo
The Revised Fundamentals of Caregiving by Jonathan Evison
The Middlesteins by Jami Attenberg
The Round House by Louise Erdrich
This Is How You Lose Her by Junot Diaz
NW by Zadie Smith
May We Be Forgiven by A. M. Homes
When It Happens to You: A Novel in Stories by Molly Ringwald
The Light Between Oceans by M. L. Stedman
Every Love Story Is a Ghost Story: A Life of David Foster Wallace by D. T. Max
The Care and Feeding of Exotic Pets by Diana Wagman
Little Century by Anna Keesey
A Land More Kind Than Home by Wiley Cash
Love Slave by Jennifer Spiegel
Familiar by J. Robert Lennon
Birds of a Lesser Paradise: Stories by Megan Mayhew Bergman
The Lifeboat by Charlotte Rogan
Black Heart on the Appalachian Trail by T. J. Forrester
Sutton by J. R. Moehringer
A Working Theory of Love by Scott Hutchins
The Orphan Master's Son by Adam Johnson
Elegant Punk by Darlin' Neal
The Snow Child by Eowyn Ivey
The Evening Hour by Carter Sickels
Brand New Human Being by Emily Jeanne Miller
In the Kingdom of Men by Kim Barnes
Boleto by Alyson Hagy
The World Without You by Joshua Henkin
The Cove by Ron Rash
Heading Out to Wonderful by Robert Goolrick
The Odditorium: Stories by Melissa Pritchard
Zombie by J. R. Angelella
At the Mercy of the Queen: A Novel of Anne Boleyn by Anne Barnhil
The Sister Queens by Sophie Perinot
The Exceptionals by Erin Cashman
The Unfinished Garden by Barbara Claypole White
Dear Life: Stories by Alice Munro
Life Among Giants by Bill Roorbach
The Dog Stars by Peter Heller

Now do you see my dilemma?  And that list is only the tip of the tip of the iceberg; it doesn't even include last year's books which spilled over onto this one--not to mention the perpetual residents of my classics bucket list: books like Lolita, the entirety of Proust's In Search of Lost Time (a fitting title for my situation), and any novel by Thomas Hardy.  I doubt it's humanly feasible to read everything, as much as I want to.  That's why I must be selective in what I read.  Which is not to say I'm not also filled with regret and longing for all the Unreads of 2012.

And what about you?  What books are on your to-be-read list?  Let us know in the comments section below.