Here are a few conflicting things in my life that I seem to have absolutely no problem reconciling. I love to read. I mean absolutely love to. I devoured books when I was a kid right through the Famous Five/Secret Seven/Hardy Boys/Three Investigators phase. There was a slight lull until I hit college when I started reading as an adult and never stopped after that.

Sure the rate isn’t what it once was (I once read nearly 100 books in a year when I was in my early 20s) but the passion is the same to the point where I was one of the midnight Harry Potter hangers out last Friday (sorry about the quality of the image – it was dark and I was too busy hanging around with little ones. Not doing too bad either – I’m 120 pages in, which, for me at this stage, is going great guns!)

This, of course, conflicts with the at least 50 choice books sitting on my shelf over there to my right that are crying out in their little book voices to be read. See my problem is that I buy way more than I can read. Always have, always will. Even now Gary Kasparov’s “How Life Imitates Chess” is vying for my attention with Mark Brandon Read’s “Chopper”, David Mitchell’s “Black Swan Green, Albert Speer’s “Inside The Third Reich”, Tim Harford’s “The Undercover Economist”, Dr Aric Sigman’s “Remotely Controlled – How Television Is Damaging Our Lives” and Alain De Botton’s “The Architecture Of Happiness”. That’s to say nothing of the Taschen books on Gaudi and Frank Lloyd Wright I got last week.

They’re all getting dirty looks from the other books that haven’t just caught my attention.

I was in Borders the other day and, quite forlornly, took this picture.

It reminds me of the time I realised (possibly when I was in college too) that I was never going to get to read even .01% of all the books I wanted to. Not even when I won the lottery and that’s all I would do with the rest of my life.

For me that was a strangely empty experience.

And now what do I do? I choose to complicate things further 🙂

I’ve always been a comic book geek (see number seven here) and I’ve been threatening for years to get back in that particular saddle. I suppose enjoying Heroes so much recently (and the parallels I saw in it with the classic Watchmen series – one I’ve had a copy of since I was a teenager) has reignited the spark. So where did I end up this week? Forbidden Planet.

I got back on the horse. Thought I’d start here:

A sucker for punishment. I know.