My Towering Inferno

My Tower of Babel is starting to topple over. Oh, I’m not talking about the original Tower of Babel, the old parable in the Bible. I’m talking instead about the tower of books that have been collecting on my desk.

In the parable, the Babylonians wanted to make a name for themselves by building a mighty city and a tower that equaled the might and power of God and reached the top of heaven. In the tale, of course, God disrupted the work by making the workers speak in different languages, so that they could no longer understand one another. The city was never completed, and the people were dispersed across the land.

In my world, the tower of books that I’ve been collecting with plans to one day read keeps getting taller and taller. I don’t have a language problem like the Babylonians, but I’m encountering a problem just as challenging: There’s simply not enough time in the day to read all the books.

The tower that keeps growing

My tower of books includes books of every shape and size and every genre and author. There’s fiction mixed together with nonfiction and self-help. There’s age-old hard cover classics right next to recently self-published paperbacks.

Here’s what I mean: I’ve got Agatha Christie’s classic thriller And Then There Were None sitting on top of Tim O’Brien’s classic The Things They Carried, part memoir, part fiction about a platoon of American soldiers fighting in the Vietnam War.

Oh I’m in need of lots of help. I have Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, a book I promised myself years ago that I would read when my wife and daughter were going back and forth talking about its virtues, and John L. Parker’s novel on running, Once a Runner, that I’ve read often over the years and can’t wait to read again. I’ve got Brene Brown’s The Gifts of Imperfection: Let Go of Who You Think You’re Supposed to Be and Embrace Who You Are holding up another self-help tomb, Natalie Goldberg’s Writing Down the Bones: Freeing the Writer Within.

That’s not all. I have books by fellow bloggers Cindy Georgakis Re-Create & Celebrate: 7 Steps To Turn Your Dreams Into Reality and Cheryl Oreglia’s Grow Damn-It: The Feeding And Nurturing Of Life near the top of the tower. (For the record, I absolutely love what I’ve read so far of Cindy’s and Cheryl’s books and, when I finish them soon, I can’t wait to share my thoughts.)

Where I got the itch

I mention my leaning tower because I write today on The Heart of the Matter in my post, An Open Book, on how my love of books started thanks in large part to the Scholastic Book Club Orders that we used to get in elementary school. Each month, my teacher would hand out a Scholastic order form and we would have the opportunity to order paperback books for a few dollars. Thanks to frequent trips to the library and my regular Scholastic purchases, I had a book on me all the time.

Anyway, my list of books has gotten out of hand. I try to catch up but I don’t seem to be putting much of a dent into the tower. It got so bad this week that a good chunk of the tower fell over. There was no inferno or babbling group of tower workers so-to-speak, but I walked into my bedroom to find the books scattered across my desk and floor. My problem is that I know how much I’ve been helped by reading and I hate to miss a word, which is good, but my reading is now insanely slow.

Oh, the hell with it, maybe it’s time for a second tower!

Related Story:

An Open Book

On The Heart of The Matter