What the Left Hand Knows

Recently I realized that my to-be-read shelves are so large and capacious that I have entire shelves of things, mostly buried in back and behind, that I've completely forgotten about.

For example: a few weeks ago I was digging through the shelves, trying to pick books for the trip to Anaheim. (This is always complicated, particularly when I have a long plane flight, since some conferences mean a lot of time for reading -- especially if the hall gets dead during sessions, but I'm stuck, alone, in the booth -- and some don't.) I discovered, among other things that were surprises to me, that I had copies of the first "Richard Aleas" novel, Little Girl Lost, and bound galleys of two of the battling Douglas Adams biographies of about five years ago.

I'm so far behind at this point that I could probably stop buying books immediately, read only from my unread stacks, live to a hundred, and still not finish everything. And yet I grabbed six books for myself at the library just this afternoon, including two more volumes of Naruto and new nonfiction by Haruki Murakami and Larry McMurtry.

I'm not sure if that's optimism or insanity...