Who is popular today?

I am infuriated by people whose libraries are only for show. But it’s time to tackle my own backlog
It is nice to have a wall full of books. Being signallers of great intellectual virtue, bookshelves are enjoying their moment in the sun, choicely lit in the background of a thousand Zoom interviews on TV. The sight of my shelves gives me limited pleasure, as I am reproached by the spines of so many books I have never actually, you know, read. It’s cheating, that’s what it is. You should only be allowed to display books you have finished, or at least got more than halfway through. Watching some opining clever dick on a news channel, with hundreds upon hundreds of weighty tomes displayed behind them, I find it impossible to concentrate on anything this intellectual fraud is saying. “You can’t have read them all!” I yell, throwing one of my own unread Grantas at the screen. “You haven’t been alive long enough to have read them all.”
Over the weekend, I met a nice guy at whom I couldn’t throw any paperbacks for this crime because he has done a deal with himself to get through all his unread books before he buys any more. John Budden, sometime footballer once on the, er, books of Crystal Palace among others, went on to be a headteacher and then chief executive of a group of academy schools. He is presently on a bit of a career break, which is just as well because he has got 125 books to read. Continue reading...