Nora owned three hundred and fourteen books she had not read. She bought another one on Tuesday. It arrived in a cardboard box that was large enough to hold a toaster, packed with enough plastic air pillows to insulate a small cabin. Inside was a single paperback about a woman who moves to a small town and discovers something about herself. Nora placed it on the shelf with the others.
The shelf had started as a single row on a bookcase in her living room. That was eight years ago. It had since expanded to fill an entire wall, then migrated into the hallway, and was now colonizing the guest bedroom with the unstoppable momentum of a glacier. Guests slept among biographies of people they had never heard of and novels with award stickers on the cover.
She had tried systems. She tried reading one chapter of each book to decide which ones deserved completion. This produced a shelf of books with a single crease in the spine, all abandoned at approximately page thirty, which is where most books stop trying to impress you and start being themselves.
She tried the one-in-one-out rule. For every book she bought, she would finish one she already owned. This lasted until she walked past a bookshop window and saw a display table with a sign that said "If You Read One Book This Year." She bought three.
Her friends had opinions. "Just get an e-reader," said one. Nora had an e-reader. It contained two hundred and twelve books she had not read. The e-reader had the advantage of being invisible, which meant the shame was portable rather than architectural. She could carry her failures in her purse.
The truth, which Nora understood but rarely said aloud, was that she did not buy books to read them. She bought books to own the possibility of reading them. Each purchase was a small contract with a future version of herself who had more time, better discipline, and a longer attention span. That woman did not exist, but she had excellent taste.
A therapist might have called it aspirational consumption. Nora called it Tuesday. The books arrived. She placed them on the shelf. She looked at the shelf. The shelf looked back. There was an understanding between them. The books did not mind being unread. They sat in patient rows, spines facing outward, titles visible, waiting for a moment that might never come.
Sometimes, on quiet evenings, Nora would stand in front of the shelf and run her fingers along the spines. Not choosing. Just touching. Feeling the texture of all those unopened worlds, all those first sentences she had not yet met. It was its own kind of reading, she decided. A reading of surfaces. Of potential.
She picked up the new paperback. She read the first page. It was good. She placed it back on the shelf, satisfied. She would finish it someday. Probably. The shelf grew by one. The guest bedroom grew smaller. The glacier advanced.