A Writer Buried in Books

     I've decided that books are my enemy, though they used to be my great love. They are taking over. They crowd my dining room, they double up in the bedroom, they make the attic floor sag. We even have a library in the bathroom: shelves and shelves of books where a normal person might have a vanity table or piles of towels…

     I once went through our library and calculated that my husband and I had read about a third of the books that we own, and I think, as we buy more books and read a third of what we buy, that the statistic is more or less holding up. Sometimes we even buy a book and go to put it on one of our few organized shelves only to find that it is already there...

     We have a psychological problem and we recognize it: We never get rid of books…It's a sick relationship we have with these piles of pages between covers. Most people would be secretly bragging if they said this, but I'm not bragging. I think it's weird and demented. Maybe I'm so involved with my books' fate because I am a writer, and I can all too well imagine a reader taking one of my books and cosigning it to the trash heap.

Amy Wilentz, "One Book Out," The New York Times Book Review, August 4, 2013