BOOK COLLECTOR

It’s a well-known fact among readers that personal to-be-read (tbr) stacks only oblige addition, often exponentially, by the veritable property of “I must read this” plus “this, this, and this” and “oh, yeah, this one too”, ad infinitum. One only need glance at the “to-read” portion of any active Goodreads account to see the exhaustive, unremitting lists of fascinating titles readerly folks load on themselves. Each year, tbrs all over the world grow at rates undeniably faster than people have time to catch up on their backlogs. Whether it’s the chase of fresh hype in Adam Johnson’s Fortune Smiles or Yanagihara’s A Little Life , the desire to travel back in time with Robert Graves’s I, Claudius or Marguerite Yourcenar’s Memoirs of Hadrain , the desperate need to finish a beloved author’s oeuvre—Toni Morrison and David Foster Wallace still beckon from the shelves, the completionist’s impulse to conquer a tome like Don Quixote or William Gaddis’s JR , the curious compulsion to find