I bought four books last month and read none of them.
That's not quite the confession it sounds like. I read other books last month, just not these four. These four are doing something else. They're sitting in a lean by the bed, which is where books go in this house once I've admitted I'm not going to start them this weekend.
Let me account for them.
There's a Caro. The first LBJ volume, the one that weighs about as much as a cat. I bought it because I want to be the kind of person who reads Caro, which is a different want from wanting to read Caro, and I knew that at the till and bought it anyway.
There's Magda Szabó's The Door, which three separate people have told me is wonderful, and I believe them, and I have not opened it.
There's a secondhand Pilgrim at Tinker Creek with someone else's pencil in the margins. I keep meaning to read the previous owner's notes as much as the book.
And there's a field guide to mushrooms, which I bought after one good walk where I saw exactly one mushroom and felt, briefly, that this was the start of a whole life I might lead. I have not since identified a single mushroom. The guide is lovely. The mushrooms are indifferent to whether I know their names.
So why keep buying them faster than I can read them.
I think the buying and the reading are two different pleasures and I've been treating them like one. Buying a book is buying an afternoon I intend to have. The afternoon doesn't always arrive. But the intention is real while it lasts, standing there at the shelf, and a few dollars is cheap for the brief and genuine feeling of being about to become slightly better company.
The stack by the bed is, if I'm honest, a small museum of people I thought I'd be. The Caro-reader. The one who forages. The woman who finishes The Door and has something to say about it at dinner.
I'm not going to tell you I've made peace with this, because I haven't, and the next time I'm near the shop I'll do it again. They've migrated from the kitchen table to the floor now, which feels like a demotion they've accepted gracefully. There's a fifth one I won't mention, because I only bought it on Tuesday.