Cone

A habit that infrequently but consistently causes me some guilt is that I infrequently but consistently buy used books off of Amazon in groups of 3 or 4, but then I don't finish those books before I buy another group. There's usually some kind of thematic unity to these purchases, so I wind up with a bunch of books on topics with which I am mostly but not completely familiar.

Sometimes I will return to some of these books, usually by taking one off my shelf and reading a chapter here and there. I also have a small shelf of books that I have barely touched. When I walk in and out of my room, I occasionally glance at this shelf and think about how excited I am to lie down and open one of these up. Soon, always soon, but never now.

In this way, books are like photographs to me. They insulate the room against monotony and ignorance. They possess a stillness when sitting on a shelf, but I sometimes interrupt that stillness to read part of a book and think about something new. I've read (part of a book) about how we live in an image culture, not a textual culture, ever since the last century, and I feel like I treat books that way. A collection of images from which I take impressions.