To The Books I Never Read
Landscape with the Fall of Icarus, Pieter Bruegel the Elder, 1560
There are about 20 books sitting on my bookshelf or idly on my desk at work that I had intentions of reading but haven't. Each of them has a unique reason for why I haven't given them the time of day. Some of them I've neglected for a trivial reason; the copy I have is a paperback, and I prefer hardcover. Others seem too long for me to ever complete, other books sit because they are fiction and not my favorite kind of read. Chronicling all 20 would be torturous, so I picked four of them that especially haunt me.
The book that I run into, every three months or so is the most painful; it's Harry Potter and The Sorcerer's Stone. I have two copies of this book, one I received as a gift from a close friend and another was left on my doorstep when some friends found out I have never read the Harry Potter books. About a year ago the #BlackHogwarts meme ran through Twitter, and I felt stupid not knowing what Hogwarts was. That would have been a good time to crack this book open, and even then I couldn't do it. I opted for the movie instead and took 4 viewings to get through it.
I saw lots of people tweeting about A Philosophy of Software Design, including some of the people I respect most in the industry. After a week of seeing it tweeted about, I checked Amazon, and It was a reasonable price, so I pulled the trigger. It's sat on my desk at work, and the only reason it doesn't have dust on it is my compulsion to clean m desk every Monday. I'm sure it's an excellent book, but when was I planning on reading this?
The Girl with the Lower Back Tattoo. Someone gave me this book, and I've been trying to get it to Good Will ever since. I've never laughed at a single one of Amy Schumer's jokes after painfully trying to make it through her Netflix special. After that impression, why would I read her book? I don't know anything else about her, but I have this nagging sense that I can't give the book away without at least reading the back cover.
The last book I'll mention is Leonardo da Vinci by my old friend Walter Isaacson. I know from reading all of your other books that this is going to be an immaculately researched volume. I also know it will have so many interesting tidbits that I'll tell people about at dinner parties. I can't put my finger on why I haven't tried to read this yet. It has all of the elements I like in books. It's a biography, and it's by an author I love and about a historically significant person. Maybe it's the ominous look of the cover or the fact that it looks and seems a lot longer than it is.