My books are judging me

My bookshelves fill me with shame. Not the fiction section – I’ve read most of those and am happily working my way through the unread ones. It’s the non-fiction ones that stare at me accusingly. The things I could have learned, the paths I could have taken, both literally and figuratively, if only I had opened them more often, or even at all. This feeling of shame began a few days ago when I was leafing through a book looking for a local walk and was struck by how many books of walks we have and how few we’ve actually done. These books hold out the promise of sunny days spent ambling through the countryside with lunch at a cosy country pub to follow. But how many have we actually done? Very few. We have stuck to the same local ones and rarely ventured further afield. And that book on walking the Thames Path? Neglected and unloved. I really do mean to walk the Thames Path, just not today.

It’s not just the walks not walked, it’s the languages not learned. The shelves are groaning with dictionaries, grammars, verb charts and books of German fairy tales in their original language. Some of these books have been used for language courses, but many were bought in the hope that I’d go on to study more once the courses ended. I am so deluded. Now, they’re dusty and forgotten at the back of the shelf. I am quite a ruthless book culler, but these language books remain unculled because I am convinced that one day I’ll pick them up and become fluent in four European languages. Hope never dies.  

Then there are the history books like Peter Frankopan’s The Silk Road and Simon Jenkins’ A Short History of England, as well as the books on economics: will I ever read John Kenneth Galbraith’s The Affluent Society or David Pilling’s The Growth Delusion? It seems unlikely, but I refuse to accept reality and am convinced that I’d be a better person if I did. Even though I probably wouldn’t remember much if I did read them. Perhaps I just need to accept that I’ll never be an expert on history or economics and move on.

I should have more luck with that shelf full of art books because I love art a lot more than economics. Have I read these books, you ask? Well, I’ve scanned a few sentences, but mostly I just look at the pictures. Maybe that’s the problem with all those books on language, history and economics: not enough pictures. In fact, I am convinced that’s the problem with adult books in general. I can remember my disappointment when I moved on from children’s books to adults’ and discovered that there were no pictures, and I’ve never really got over it. If only John Kenneth Galbraith had commissioned Quentin Blake to illustrate his books, I might well have read The Affluent Society. Or I might just have looked at the pictures.