I am disgusted with myself

As of this morning, my Amazon wish list (which is essential my TBR list) has hit 13 pages, which is 306 items, all books except for 2 movies.

On my bedside table I have 6 books (lent by friends and family) that I have not touched. I also have an entire bookshelf of unread books in my office/library.

There's a very good reason for this... well, okay, there's a reason for this.

It may have already been established that I'm an obsessive person, and that carries through into all aspects of my life. Especially my reading. "Eclectic" is a nice way of describing my bookshelves... I could think of a few less nice descriptors, some of which have been uttered by my ever-patient husband who (I think) tries never to go into my office/library because he's terrified of the next inevitable move when he has to help me box and cart this collection to a new location.

Most of the unread books on my shelf are the lonely stragglers let behind after I have ended one phase of interest and started another.

...and here are just a few of those leftovers... and MANY of these are ones I've started, half-finished, or put down a few pages before the end. One book was lost in a freak, rogue wave in Mexico last year (The Golden Ratio)... and is on my wish list to remind me to re-purchase/finish it.

Fairy-tale/Mythology/Ancient Literature phase:
Fearless Girls, Wise Women & Beloved Sisters (Kathleen Ragan)
Fairy Tales and the Art of Subversion (Jack Zipes)
Oxford Dictionary of Ancient Deities (Turner & Coulter)
Many Ramayanas, The Diversity of a Narrative Tradition in South Asia (Paula Richman)
Arabesque, Narrative Structure and the Aesthetics of Repetition in 1001 Nights (Sandra Naddaff)
Harun al-Rashid and the World of the Thousand and One Nights (Andre Clot)
Early Japanese Literature: Kojiki or Records of Ancient Matters (Charles F Horne and BH Chamberlain)
Mythology of All Races (13 volume set of hardcover books)
Literature of Ancient Egypt (Simpson, Faulker, and Wente)
The Legend of Etana and the Eagle, or the epic poem The City they hated (S. Langdon)

Philosophy Phase:
Conjectures and Refutations: The Growth of Scientific Knowledge (Karl R. Popper)
The Myth of Sisyphus and other essays (Albert Camus)
The Analects (Confucius, Penguin Classics Edition)
The Book of Dead Philosophers (Simon Critchley)

Ultimate Nerd Phase:
The Big Bang (Simon Singh -> I love this guy, have read all his earlier works)
Alpha Beta (John Man)
Spoken Here (Mark Abley)
Curious and Interesting Numbers (David Wells)
The Golden Ratio: the story of PHI, the world's most astonishing number (Mario Livio)
Fighting Techniques of the Ancient World 3000BC to 500AD (Rob S Rice)
Geography of Religion: Where God Lives, Where Pilgrims Walk (John Esposito)
Godel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid (Douglas R Hofstadter)
Ancient Inventions (Peter James)
E=MC2: a biography of the world's most famous equation (David Bodanis)

Classics Phase (including one intense reading of Russian literature):
The Idiot (Fyodor Dostoevsky)
Martin Chuzzlewit (Charles Dickens)
Heart of Darkness (Joseph Conrad)
Beowulf
The History of Thirteen (Honore de Balzac)
Paradise Lost & Paradise Regained (Milton)
Metamorphoses (Ovid)

World Comics Phase:
Amulet, book 3 (Kazu Kibuishi)
De:Tales (Fabio Moon & Gabriel Ba)
Flight, volume 4 (various artists)
Wondercity, books 1-4 (Giovanni Gualdoni, Stefano Turconi, Emanuele Tenderini)

And that's only a fraction of the books/phases I have moved in and out of in the last 8 years... I haven't even listed any of the general fiction books on my shelf, or mentioned that I will read/love one of an author's books, then buy all of them... and not read them <cough, cough> Matt Ruff, Joe Coomer, William Wall, Kevin Brockmeier <cough>. This is why my Amazon wish list is obscenely large and why the oh-so-clever *recommendations* feature never works for me.

...this is also the reason my husband badgered me into getting a Kindle (which I now love). He claims that every book on my shelf has been paid for 1000 times in accumulative moving costs, and I would have to agree with him.

Now I wish that all the books on my virtual TBR pile would come out in Kindle editions... so there's no physical evidence of this obsessive book-hopping habit.