From JON CARROLL:

I certainly do it. My home is littered with books purchased but not (yet) read. It's also littered with books abandoned (because they had some flaw, real or imagined, that made me dislike them) or merely unfinished (because one day I put them down to read, say, a magazine article about Bruce Springsteen, and I just somehow didn't ever bother to pick them up again. I liked them fine, just not at the length that the author had chosen to write them). Since my house is also littered with other things, including litter, it's also true that I have occasionally lost books that I really did intend to finish.

I bought a bunch of books last month (many of them second-hand), and sold a few (to the used book store), too. I've been doing a pretty good job of reading them, although I do have a constantly growing stack of books yet to be read, and a few that I bought and never read, and will probably never read. Books are an addiction that I don't feel guilty about. I buy too many, yes, but I also use the library, and I buy paperbacks, mostly--if a book that I want to read is coming out in hard cover, I put myself on the waiting list at the library, and practice patience.

But yeah, I do feel guilty about that, a little bit. If I'm reading a library copy, I'm not supporting the writer with my dollars as I would be if I bought it. But if I bought every book I read, well, I'd be even more broke than I am now. So I guess that's where my guilt comes in.

I've had to turn on "word verification" for comments after I got hit with 50 spam comments in the last five minutes. Hopefully it won't be too annoying to have to retype the displayed letters. I know it is annoying, but hopefully it should avoid me having to either turn off comments or start moderating them.

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