Why I will not be doing the "unread books" meme

[nolly]

The cut'n'pasted text describes unread books as "they sit on the shelf to make you look smart or well-rounded." I use LibraryThing, where the list originates. I have many books tagged unread, including some from that list. Not one of them is on the shelf to make me look smart or well-rounded. I have never bought a book I did not intend to read. Occasionally, I change my mind about a book before I read it, but I generally don't keep those around. My shelves tell you something about who I am and how I think, and what they say is not a lie. The unread books, in fact, are segregated from the read books, and are in my bedroom for easy access, since I do most of my reading in bed at night.

Comments

[brooksmoses]

There are very few books that I own that I bought for myself and didn't intend to read, but I can think of at least one. I mean, how could I not pick up a copy of the Fortran 90 ISO standard in Cyrillic? (I presume Russian, but I don't actually know.) And a few books of math tables, which I bought with much the same impulse that I keep a slide rule around -- they are nifty tools that have become obsolete, and are a connection to history.

I have bought lots of books that I did not intend to read but intended to give to other people, though.

[aldren.livejournal.com]

I'll go one further: I've purchased books with the intent to give them to other people, knowing full-well they will never be read. The incident I'm thinking about involved buying a book on Robert E. Lee to sit next to a model someone had made of The Robert E. Lee.

But in general, yes: Books should be bought to be read.

[nolly.livejournal.com]

Actually, I've bought plenty of books for gifts, but I expected the recipeint to read them, and in most, if not all cases, I know that occurred.

I also have reference books (including cookbooks) I have not read cover-to-cover and do not intend to, but either I have used them, or I intended to when I purchased them, and in most cases, still intend to.

I have never found a Fortran standard in Cyrillic, but I can read enough Russian that I might count it as utilized under the reference-book metric. :)

Alas, the cursor on my slide rule broke, and I haven't found a right-size replacement. (I haven't looked that hard recently, either.)

[brooksmoses]

The entertaining thing is that, while I can't read any Russian [1], I am familiar enough with the Fortran standard that I could recognize it almost immediately, and find my way around the inside of it.

[1] This is not entirely true. I can now recognize "Fortran" in Russian. :)

[nolly.livejournal.com]

I've forgotten the vast majority of the vocabulary I once knew, but I remember the pronunciations well enough to read cognates and a few other words. I would expect a technical standard to contain many cognates.