Here we are filled with melancolie de Januaire as Marcel Proust said in his Remembrance of Things Past (A la Recherche du Temps Perdu) all about his experience temping at Purdue University and his romance with the mysterious Madeleine, that delectable little cupcake. He returned to Paris and to Mama but could never forget her or Purdue and this pain drove him to create magnificent art that nobody would read, at least not anyone whom I know personally, though many of them have a copy of R.O.T.P. right there smack in the middle of their bookshelf.

Let us talk about unread books for a moment, dear reader. They are filling up my house and perhaps yours and what are we going to do about it? A tower of books stands on my bedside table swaying slightly in the dark, Dante and Herman Melville and Dickens's Great Expectations and Anthony Powell's A Dance to the Music of Time and about forty-three other books I've purchased from Powells.com over the past few months. You know how it is when you browse a great independent bookstore web site. You're filled with noble ambitions to finally Catch Up on your reading so you don't feel like such a dolt when everyone at the dinner party except you has read Man Athwart the Midden by Soutane Tippet that everybody and his uncle is reading nowadays. You want to be abreast of what's current in the World of Thought and also you want to read the books you were assigned to read in college lo those many years ago. Yes, you feel bad about not having read Moby Dick and yet getting an A in Miss Pickett's 19th-Century American Novel class thanks to your brilliant term paper, "The Prosthetics of Obsession: Ahab's Peg Leg As Instrument of Exclamation." So you order it, and Jane Austen and Boswell's Life of Johnson and Johnson's multi-volume biography by Robert Caro and a few other tomes and now they teeter eleven feet high over your bed and could fall and give you a concussion. This has happened. There are seriously ugly people walking around who were as good-looking as you or me until a stack of unread books fell on them as they slept. Poor things.

My reason for not reading as much as I'd like is that I'm trying to write a book, plus exhaustion: I have suffered from sleep-deprivation ever since my daughter was born six years ago. And I'm old and poky and moody and can't read as fast as when I was your age. So the books keep mounting up.

Januaire is the perfect time to try to read your backlog of books, but first you have to deal with the ones your relatives gave you for Christmas, those Big Important Gift Books that your loved ones lay on you because, first of all, you did so well in college, and second, your home is full of books and therefore you must love them. This year for Christmas I got Proust's Journals in twelve volumes and Anthony Powell's A Long Slow Walk over the Moors of Being and Melville's Collected Papers and Robert Caro's Notebooks, Vol. 1-12, and of course I tried to look happy when I unwrapped them and jumped up and down and got tears of gratitude in my eyes and cried, "Oh, bless you, dear hearts! Oh! My life is now fulfilled!." But now I have to deal with this bushel of bricks which is sitting on my coffee table (already laden with last Christmas's Snowy Tree Photographs of Ansel Adams and The Louisville Slugger: A Century of Bats and The Joy of Collecting Liquor Stamps and Giants in the Earth: A Critical Edition and Pictures of Everybody Living in or near Chilicothe, Ohio, in 1879). When someone gives you a book, the least you can do is skim through it and find One Interesting Tidbit which you then relate to them the next time you see them (e.g. "I was reading that fascinating volume of Melville's papers that you gave me and did you realize that in 1867 he paid about 37 cents for an aspidistra?") after which you are permitted to give the book to the Salvation Army. What they do with it, God only knows. Use it for insulation in a shelter for indigent authors, probably.

If you're ever going to get these books read that are piling up all over the house and filling your bookshelves, you must start now to simplify your life. No. 1, give up television. It's an enormous waste of time, plus the exposure to radiation is what is giving you those headaches and making you surly and unattractive. No. 2, forget about cooking, just fix salads and sandwiches, they're easier to eat while you're reading. No. 3, take a book to work: you'd be surprised how much extra time you have on the job. No. 4, don't sleep so much, especially not when you're reading.

Your friends at Powells.com don't want me to tell you this, but there are too many books being published and you own a lot of them. Here you are wasting your time reading this tripe of mine when you could've been getting started on Anthony Powell. What's wrong with you? Turn off your computer and go to your bookshelf and get started.

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