Reading and Reading Again

About 30 years ago I divested myself of the bulk of the library I’d been lugging around from apartment to apartment since my undergraduate days, mostly literature books, a dozen boxes full, that I scattered among three used bookstores. I kept only those books that I definitely wanted to read again or thought I might have reason to make reference to. That ended up being a manageable four boxes, or two or three bookshelves worth. I’ve added to that since, probably tripling the shelf space, but I still only keep books that I want to read again or make reference to sometime in the future. But at the library this morning it struck me that that future is now. For the past year, since my retirement, I’ve been regularly going to the library, checking out one or two books each week, most often from the new releases section (there has yet to be a week where something didn’t strike my interest, be it a history of baseball, a collection of American humor, or a biography of George Washington). I probably could keep this regime up indefinitely. But what about all those books in my study that I’ve been meaning to reread “later”? At this point, when would later be? The obvious revision in my reading schedule is to begin either alternating reading new books with previously read books or simultaneously reading the new and the previous. I sidestepped that choice this morning in the library by checking out Hemingway’s A Moveable Feast, an older work that isn’t in my study and that I don’t recall having read before.