The Curse Of King Dewey

In that famous story of King Midas, he is gifted with the power of turning anything he touches to gold. He winds up turning his own flesh and blood to gold, and it's supposed to be a really tragic story, although he dodges a few bullets that aren't to be mentioned in polite society. Sometimes I feel something like the king, except with something either more valuable than gold or a lot less valuable than it, depending on how you measure.

It's books. I love reading, but there's something in it that is enough to drive me out of my mind. There are too many books out there. I'll never read them all, no matter how much I apply myself to the task, and then there are the magazines and online stuff. It's necessary to forget about that stuff. I wish that, in clamping down on the flow of such thoughts, I could likewise stop the torrent of books coming my way.

I can stop deliberately procuring books. I can resist the impulse to go after new ones that I find out about, or old ones that I remember and never read, and that helps some. I have this big pile of books here at home to work down. Really it's four piles, but such semantics do not impact the problem. The point is that I want to deal with those, but I actually can't stop the flow of outside books. Everyone knows I'm a reader, and so they're always passing stuff off to me.

God knows that I want the books, but I can't have them before I deal with what's at home. The pity is that other failing of mine, saying no. I take the books every time. I do offer the caveat that it will be awhile, but I take them anyway. It is thus that I never make any real headway on the pile of books. It's like a bank loan, the interest of which keeps rising and preventing me from paying the base sum. I probably read about that somewhere.