W: Worst Bookish Habit
Photographing my bookshelves reminded me just how many books I have: between four and five hundred, perhaps half of them unread. Dozens have been dragged back and forth between my parents’ home and my college, and then to my Ann Arbor apartment, and then to the house I live in now. They’ll all be boxed up and moved again in a couple months.
So it’s a bad habit that I often neglect the books I own (“They’re mine! I have all the time in the world to read them!”) in favor of library books (“Oooh! I don’t have to buy this but I can absorb all its stories and characters and ideas before returning it!”), though perhaps that’s preferable to buying even more books and then being stymied by indecision whenever I regard my shelves.
But I have a worse habit yet, which is checking out about 3 dozen books and a dozen CDs from the library and then ignoring them, too. They wait week after week on the bookshelf I purchased specifically for borrowed books. Eventually, the library e-mails me a notice that someone else has requested this or that item and I can no longer renew it. So then the book is in demand. Then I start to read it. Then I find that I have wasted the time I might have spent with it, and either keep it until it’s two weeks overdue, or return it unfinished and pine after it.
Dreadful business.
But I have a worse habit yet, which is clicking around on Archive of Our Own and reading fanfiction incessantly. It’s like overeating because your body never tells you it’s full. It’s like voluntary insomnia. It’s like opium. I click and click and am not satisfied with clicking until it’s 1 AM and I am going to regret getting up for work in the morning. That’s the worst habit of all.
Do you have any bad book habits?
Egotist's Club 