What a strange question to ask, and yet I find myself asking this of myself more and more often.
I love to read, and I do read often, but at the same time I still find myself looking for more stuff to read while having plenty of stuff to read.
Since 2008, since I first bought an Ereader, I have been on a quest to replace my entire paperback library with the electronic version of it. Given that my library was a thousand books plus it seemed a daunting task, and an expensive one. But with enough time, patience, and a willingness to look in the darker corners of cyberspace when money became an issue, I was able to do it.
After clearing that goal it should have been the end. My aim was to be able to carry around the library I had built in the physical world, and to that I was successful. However, with that in hand, I fell victim to the vice of greed. I kept buying, kept hunting, kept err. . . .acquiring.
So yesterday I pushed the book count on my reader to just over four thousand. And again I thought I must be done. Four thousand is a good number. If you're in between three and four you're always thinking about getting to four. But if you're at the beginning of four it's so far away from five that to make the trip would be almost not worth it. I have more than I can read in a lifetime, or at least for the next twenty years.
Thus today I was reading Robin Hobb's Forest Mage, and the bug to find more hits me again. I find myself putting down the Ereader, getting on the computer, and hunting again. Here's the kicker-every search, every legitimate bookstore, every result that pops up I've seen it already.....nothing new.
Is it a sign, I wonder. Can it be there are no more oceans to cross, and all that explorer jazz? Was the quest to buy, and or. . . ."cough" acquire all those books more fulfilling than actually having them? When is Enough 'Enough'?
I'm not really asking anybody what they think of this. I'm sort of asking myself, but putting my thoughts into a forum for book lovers just feels right. I still think the Ereader is the greatest thing to happen since music went digital, and to say I have more books than music is an awesome thing. But sometimes a kid in a candy store can still get sick from eating too much candy.
PS-Is there a Willy Wonka for bookworms, and if so, how awesome would it be to win a lifetime supply of books?
