Anyone with a large library will frequently be asked the same tiresome question: “Have you read all of these books?” As if books were objects merely to be read, and not treasures to be savored, to be stored up against the (seemingly) inevitable collapse of all that is good and holy in this world. Now, Umberto Eco has written a great essay addressing this very question, and there’s no way I’m going to top—or even add a minuscule portion to—what that noted author said, so I will not try.
I do, however, have a very large library, of which I am too proud to be able to humblebrag about, and I have often, very often, been asked that apparently all-too-obvious question. (The writer Eco naturally surpasses me here as well, having been the owner of two libraries (one in his vacation home) of 30,000 and of 20,000 volumes.) To be sure, I am also asked which are my favorites, and how they are organized, and other queries of what I consider to be a more germane nature. But still, the most frequent question I am asked about my books is still: “Have you read all of these books?”
The answer, of course, is No. Not only have I not read all of these books, in fact many if not most of the books that I have read no longer reside in my library, as there are all sorts of reasons to get rid of a volume once you’ve read it, and only a few reasons to keep a book once read. (Though I have lots of those, too.) I have an unofficial notation in my database of books that I’ve read before I started explicitly tracking them in the db, but I don’t have a listing of all the tons and tons of science fiction I read as a teenager that I no longer own, nor of the many many books I’d borrow from the various used bookstores I worked at and read during my lunch breaks. And the list goes on. I have a flag for ‘Yes, I read this book’ in the database, as I say, but I try to be cautious of marking the various tomes, as I’m not always sure if I read this or that story, or if I read it in that particular edition with that particular introduction. And so on.
But, as my two readers of this blog know, I’ve been tracking my actual books read in that selfsame database since about June of 2015. And, since I now have each and every single book in my library catalogued (although I did find just last week a dozen books in my Werewolves & Vampires section that I’d somehow neglected to enter), I can announce with all sorts of flourishes and whatever else one does with sackbuts and other medieval stage instruments, that I can now state with absolute certainty* (* but see below) that I have read a significant portion of my library, viz., the titular Ten Percent (10%).
The actual calculation is as follows: As of today, I have 11,727 entries in my database for my own book collection—the last entry being the Montague Summers book The Werewolf. And, just this morning, while waiting for my chance to buy tickets for next years Comic-Con (which I did not succeed at doing, btw), I finished my Total Books Read #1173, the marvelous translation by Helen Waddell of some of the various lives and sayings of The Desert Fathers. Now I will point out that I usually put caveats around the books I say I’ve read, not counting comic books and graphic novels, but for this 10% figure I’m using the Total Books Read number, which includes comics, because I am looking at the library as a whole (that’s the 11,727 number). (For those of you really obsessed with stats and numbers, I can tell you that I have 11,186 books in my library excluding the comics, so I passed the 10% mark a while back, though I can’t just pluck out Total Books Read #1119 (Wittgenstein’s Poker), because I’ve acquired many books since reading that one back in July, never mind the fact that I just added those vampire and werewolf books recently that were sitting on the shelves for years now.) (And actually, horrifying thought, I just realized that three of my books read were not technically in my own library, but were books in my wife’s and my daughter’s own personal stock, the last being a James Bond book that my girl had but that I’d somehow never gotten around to grabbing before. So … aargh, maybe I haven’t read so many books as I thought and need another three books to get up to a full 10%, not including those books I’ve read twice since starting this tracking (another three books, so maybe it’s a wash), but now I’m so upset I can’t even remember how many parentheses I need to close now so I’ll just throw one out here.)
In any case (darn numbers and statistics and spreadsheets!), The Desert Fathers turned out to be a very delightful book, the stories being reminiscent of many of the Zen tales told of the early patriarchs of that weird little thing that might be a religion. Of course, Helen Waddell stacks the decks in favor of delight and humble wisdom, but that’s not really such a bad thing. One doesn’t always need to read the highlights of medieval hagiographic literature and find disgusting abasement and almost vicious self-mortification; though there’s a little bit of that here as well. But many, most, of the stories are uplifting and ennobling, and the beautiful (unconsciously so) story of St. Pelagia the Harlot is a triumphant fulfillment of this entire little volume. Check it out.