Confessions: The Book Collector

When I was a kid I loved to read. Whether it was my beloved Baby-Sitters Club or the latest from Christopher Pike, I just couldn’t get enough. A trip to the book store was just as much fun as a trip down the toy aisle for me and to be honest, it still is. I love books.

I spent my summers devouring books. I wasn’t quite as fast a reader as my sister who would often finish off two or more books in a day, but if it was a good one I would stay up until I finished every last word. I waited eagerly for each new release by my favorite authors. I know my parents bought some of my books, but I remember using my allowance or baby sitting money for quite a few of them too. As soon as I got my hands on one I was ready to sit down and read. As I got older, the lure of boys was enough to convince me to put the books down and get out of the house, but I was still able to get my reading in.

These days I’m still just as addicted to books. I buy them up like crazy. I peruse Amazon on a regular basis and heaven forbid I actually step foot in a book store. I can’t resist the promise of a fascinating story or the next big thing that will change my boring life. I love the feel of a new book in my hands. The problem is, I never have time to actually read them. I bring them home where they sit on my night stand for months collecting dust.

Now and then I pick one up from the night stand when I have a few spare moments before bed. I’ll read a few pages until my eyes can no longer stay open and then set it back down. On very rare occasions, like when I have a new Nicholas Sparks novel I’ll actually manage to read a chapter or two. Those are about the only books I seem to finish here lately and the last one took me over a month to actually read. Most of the time I read a few chapters and the book sits so long that I feel like I need to start all over. Eventually it ends up on the bottom of the stack, never to be finished.

I have stacks and stacks of unfinished books. I even have a pretty good stack that I’ve never even started reading. A while back I vowed to myself that I would not buy any more books until I finished reading some of the ones already lining my bookshelves at home. Unfortunately, I forgot about that vow and ordered a couple more, as well as pre-ordering another. I’m only about half way through Skinny Bitch (which one day deserves a post of its own) and not quite half way through Into the Wild (which is interesting but a very slow read for me), the last two that I purchased. I’m determined to finish them, yet I couldn’t resist starting in on one of the new ones last night. There’s just something so fresh and satisfying about cracking open a new book.