Books I'll Never Read

I’m sitting near a copy of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit as I write this. It’s a book that is not only almost six-hundred pages long, it also has a reputation of being at times incomprehensible to those not taking an entire university-level course on the subject thanks to the author’s questionable prose. It’s not something I plan to read anytime soon, and indeed, when I picked it up, I joked about how it could sit on my shelf of the books I have but have never read.

To be fair, it’s not like I went out and bought a copy of Hegel. The exact circumstances with which this book came into my possession aren’t really something I feel comfortable talking about on this blog, but the closest analog, I suppose, would be something akin to a gift. The important thing is, I didn’t spend any money on it. If I had, I feel like I would have a different attitude towards it; I don’t generally go out and buy books I know I won’t read. If I bought it, I’d be more likely to at least give it an honest effort.

If a book cost me twenty dollars and I don’t read it, then I feel like I’m out twenty dollars. If someone else bought it, then I don’t feel like that person’s twenty dollars matters whether I read the book or not. That probably sounds flippant or ungrateful, but I guess a better way to think about it would be this: if I bought it, I spent twenty dollars so I could read a book. If somebody else bought it, they spent twenty dollars so they could give me a book. In the latter, the transaction is already completed -- I got the book, didn’t I?

This sort of thinking does discount libraries, of course, which (in the before times) I imagine would be a middle ground of sorts. I wouldn’t have spent anything besides the time searching it out, but that’s still my time, right? That’s not nothing.

There are definitely other factors I’m discounting by thinking like this. I’m just trying to make sense of what I’ve already been doing, reasoning out actions I’ve already taken instead of talking about the thought process that led up to a decision and this is where my mind went to first. Maybe I need to read more books about it.

-F