October 31, 2025
Literature
Kye Hamilton
Over the past year or so, I’ve been on a mission to read all of the “classic books” such as: To The Lighthouse, One Hundred Years of Solitude, East of Eden, The Brothers Kramatozov, The Bell Jar, The Metamorphosis, and Anne Karrenena. These are just a handful of the books that have been on my list, and of that handful, I’ve read but a few.
Few things give me more pleasure than literature. It is a part of my daily routine that I look forward to each time I awaken, and I wouldn’t give it up for anything (except maybe food or water).
But lately, my reading routine has turned into just that: a routine. My mission to consume each book has started to feel like running on a literary treadmill. By the time I finish a book, there are five more that I’m ‘dying to read.’ What’s worse is that books (especially thousand-page classics) take a lot of time to read, and in that time, I begin to eye other books and add them to my list. As my undertaking has become more ambitious, I find myself struggling to maintain interest in a single novel without getting lost in a sea of other novels that seem even more interesting to read.
This problem has compounded to the point that I have started dreading being in the vicinity of a bookstore, which I always find myself in regardless if I’m just starting a new book, or how little money is in my bank account. Bookstores were once my safe haven from a chaotic and overstimulating world; and recently, I would describe them with the same harsh adjectives. The thousands of books lining their walls now bombard my vision with more “essential” titles to read. My list keeps growing endlessly long and my patience from one book to the next keeps shrinking impossibly short. I’ll be fifty pages into a book and instead of focusing on the richness of the characters and world that the author has painstakingly designed for my enjoyment, I’m rummaging through my endless list in my head, obsessing over what I’ll be reading next.
This has all led to me committing an unforgivable sin: not finishing books. I move on from half-read books to the next, telling myself I will “get around to it later” or I’ll “finish it on audiobook”, simply because I want to get further down my list and I’m not getting through it fast enough.
My sprint to the finish is made endlessly tiresome by the fact that I will never reach my goal. I only have one lifetime to read and there are far too many classic books to read. I am standing on thousands of years of literary history, finding time to read a morsel of it is impossible.
So, where does that put me? I will never have time to finish all of the classics, and I did not start this journey with the intention of strictly reading classics for the rest of my life. And what was this project for anyway? To keep these long-dead authors alive? To bolster my intelligence? To make myself feel smarter? Why should I view the classical library as a check list to get through anyway?
Ultimately, I think this issue can be boiled down to something quite simple, something that plagues both readers and laymen alike in this increasingly check-listed world: I am uncomfortable with the present moment.
We are all mortal beings. Our time on Earth is but a blink in the eyes of the Universe, and in that blink we can only experience so much. Sure, it’s tragic that none of us will ever experience a fraction of the amount of joy that this world has to offer, but that’s also a good problem to have. I’m trying to learn to take comfort in that. Instead of getting caught up in the sea of history, we should instead learn to pause with each passing breath and enjoy what we are doing whether that be reading a book, conversing with a friend, or exploring some grand monument. Each thing we experience will be the last time we experience it for the first time. It is special within itself – a one-of-a-kind moment that can never happen again.
I will never read a book for the first time again, and I should savor that experience. Having something to look forward to is great, sure, but if you spend your whole life just looking forward to that next book to read, metaphorically or literally, eventually you’ll be left at the end of your life with nothing to do but look back on all the times you weren’t living in the moment.
I want to read for the simple reason that I enjoy reading, not to fill out an arbitrarily chosen bucket list, and I hope that by the time I reach the end of my life I’m smiling not because of how many books I read but because of how much fun I had while reading them.