In that location comes a point in every reader's life when they must brand peace with all the books they'll never read. This is truthful even for the almost voracious reader in the earth. They say Alexander Pope was the terminal person to take read every volume e'er written. Given today'south publishing release schedules and the appearance of e-books, a newborn in 2022 who lived to be eighty and did nothing but read their entire life would not even read a minor fraction of the world's library, an exponentially growing Boom-boom straight out of Borges's most fevered fantasy.

When you're younger, y'all know logically that you will not, cannot, read every book. However youth's convincing illusion of immortality is non confined to the realms of romance and illegal substances—it informs your reading equally well, and it does so in two senses. Outset, all books possess a nimbus of potentiality, notwithstanding faint. Truthful, it may non be likely that yous'll read Finnegans Wake, but information technology's possible. 2d, believing you possess an space amount of life, you can fritter it abroad on books both trivial and great. A nostalgic rereading of The Hitchhiker's Quartet? Sounds fun! An abortive yearlong stab at 2666? Why not!

Merely as holds true for many other things, these illusions begin to fall away effectually the historic period of 40. You don't accept fourth dimension to waste on bad books, and you know yourself better than to seriously recollect you're going to learn French in club to readÀ  la recherche du temps perduin its original linguistic communication. Y'all know yourself well—likewise well, maybe. Your tastes can easily become circumscribed past habit, and yous venture less often afield to the strange shelves that turned up unexpected favorites in your youth. These tendencies should be countered whenever possible, but crumbling unavoidably shapes a reader.

Ane manifestation, for me anyway, is an increasing willingness to carelessness a book if information technology isn't very practiced. For instance, a recently published and heavily praised novel that stunk like two-24-hour interval-onetime fish and that I gave upwardly on after a affiliate (I wrote nigh that experience here). Now that I think almost it, I may not even have gotten through the first chapter. I only knew. I knew it wasn't good, and I knew information technology wasn't going to get a lot better, and I knew myself, and I knew there were other books I'd rather exist spending my time on. I retrieve when I was younger, I would have finished it, as I finished many other books I hated. When you're young, hating books (and music and art and film and TV) is important. Information technology'southward a vital means of shaping your own artistic taste—I owe a lot as a writer to books I've hated over the years. But when you're older, hating art is an indulgence, a vice, and, worst of all, a waste matter of the time yous increasingly have less of.

More more often than not, every bit I've gotten older, I've become aware of the fact that I just won't get around to some books. Perfectly worthy books: books with many admirers, by authors of stature and importance. It's a sad feeling, a little like beingness in a crowded party and scanning the scene, aware of all the interesting, funny people you might exist friends with simply will never make the effort to know.

Here is a more or less random list of some of the books I'll never read:

one. Lawrence Durrell's The Alexandria Quartet

I have owned a handsome boxed edition of this since I was in high schoolhouse. I don't know where I got it—if it was a birthday present, it was a strange birthday present for a sixteen-year-old. I recollect I actually once read a little of the offset volume, Justine. I have a sense of it as antique and mustily erotic, and it brings me pleasure enough as an object: the sturdy box, the color-coded volumes, the original artwork of a domed mosque and minarets. I don't plan to ruin a perfectly good thing by ever opening it once more.

ii. Minor Joseph Conrad

The Undercover Agent is i of my favorite books, and Eye of Darkness is an influential and prescient—if problematic—part of the canon. But The Pointer of Golden? Am I going to read The Pointer of Aureate? Information technology seems unlikely. Also minor Henry James. I'll be lucky if I get to major Henry James. An embarrassing admission: I've never read Henry James, except The Turn of the Spiral and diverse fragments. He'southward "on the listing" as they say, or as I say, but the listing is long, and life is not. I fully intend to read The Ambassadors and What Maisie Knew. But will I read The Princess Casamassima? Come on.

3. To the Lighthouse

I read this i in higher, but did I really read it? I opened it many times, and my eyes followed the words on the page, simply did the words jump from my optic fretfulness to my encephalon? Clearly not, as I remember very little of it. Is there really a lighthouse? I think there might be. A mother within a country manor? Maybe. Really, this is an example of a larger category: important books that I technically read in a state of boyish torpor and will now probably never actually read.

4. The Bible

Look, I know it's of import. I know it'due south the wellspring of the Western canon. I know I should read it, and I'm not going to. You can't make me. I've read Ecclesiastes, which is totally groovy, and when I was a kid, I was fascinated and terrified, equally most kids and credulous adults are, by the prophecies in Revelation. Simply I just don't see myself diving into Corinthians, let lone Colossians. I confess here that I'll never read it, and I won't enquire for forgiveness.

5. Space Jest

I've tried it a few different times. I can't do information technology. I don't sense enough reward. The take a chance, however, is obvious: having to read Infinite Jest. David Foster Wallace may well have been a genius, but I like geniuses who edit their piece of work. The signal-to-dissonance ratio is merely besides depression for me. Yes, I've read "A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Practise Again," and yep, it's pretty good. Still, I'm happy to die without e'er trying this supposedly groovy volume again.

half-dozen. To Impale a Mockingbird

I somehow never read this 1 every bit a child, and I can't imagine sitting downwardly with it as an adult. It isn't then much that I feel likewise one-time for the book now, though at that place is that. It's more thatTo Kill a Mockingbird has been then thoroughly absorbed by the civilisation that I feel like I've already read it. It already exists in my mind, a mélange of plot points and character names and historical details and Gregory Peck pacing a courtroom. I've made my peace with this version standing in for the existent thing.

seven. Moby-Dick

This is another embarrassing one to admit, merely what the hell? We've already come up this far. Obviously, I should read it, and I intend to—I do!—but I harbor a lurking suspicion that I won't. Like To Impale a Mockingbird, I know a lot about it. Is that good enough? The names lonely—Ishmael, Ahab, Pequod, Queequeg—somehow ward me abroad. They manage to simultaneously evoke the Bible, nineteenth-century New England deprivation, and fish. My intention to read Moby-Dick feels like the equivalent of my intention to clean out my role closet—well-meaning and more or less sincere, nevertheless besides easily averted past things that are more fun (a category that includes almost everything).

*

This essay is not purely bittersweet—there's relief in being also onetime for certain things. I yet shudder at the thought of twelve-year-quondam me and the phone-book-size edition of Atlas Shrugged I hauled around for a year (in a briefcase—could that be correct? I may have retroactively embellished the memory for maximum shame). I had no idea what it was well-nigh, but the embrace was cool, and it seemed to marking me equally the intellectual I was (which is to say not an intellectual at all). God but knows what my teachers made of this arrayal. I dutifully read On the Route at eighteen, and my Bukowski phase was paired, sommelier-like, with my early twenties. There are simply ages when certain books and authors work best, and if you lot miss your window, y'all've missed it.

In my afterward twenties, out of curiosity and perverse hipster irony (with a nuance of self-loathing thrown in), I tried Battleground Earth,The Da Vinci Code, and Ender's Game. I'm here to written report that Battlefield Earth is equally every bit bad as you assume it is. I snobbishly wanted to see why people liked those books, and I came abroad unenlightened. In any case, I would never do that now. I have long since made peace with other people'southward taste and the fact that reading doesn't—shouldn't!—serve the same function for everyone.

The culling of a potential library is a pleasurable, if melancholy, exercise. I appreciate my friends far more at forty than I did at xx, and I appreciate books more than likewise. What a pleasure it is to read a keen volume! What a joy information technology is to shed the weight of all the should-take-reads—and admit they're never-wills. And who knows—maybe I'll get around to Finnegans Wake afterward all. But please stop telling me to read Space Jest.

Adam O'Fallon Price is a staff writer for The Millions and the writer of two novels: The K Tour and The Hotel Neversink (Can House Books, 2019). His short fiction has appeared in The Paris Review, Vice, t he Kenyon Review, The Iowa Review, and many other places. His podcast, Fan's Notes, is an ongoing discussion virtually books and basketball game. Find him online at adamofallonprice.com and on Twitter at @AdamOPrice.