Bookshelf Haiku: Haiku-A-Day Challenge #9

Image CC-BY-NC-ND-2.0 Steve Rotman on Flickr.com

I am joining Trina Haase at Trinarrative for a daily haiku challenge in December.

I think most people probably have bookshelves full of books they’ve read. But I rarely reread books, so when I finish one, I tend to keep it moving–to a friend, the library, my students. My very full shelves are full of books I haven’t read yet, some of which I’ve been moving around with me since I started buying books in earnest when I was 13 or 14. Browsing my shelves today, I was struck by how very aspirational I was as a teenager. Thucydides, Herodotus, the complete Euripides, The Divine Comedy, several volumes of the Diary of Samuel Pepys, A la recherche du temps perdu in the original French plus two different translations for the purposes of comparison. I doubt I ever read The History of the Peloponnesian War, and there is no longer any hope for Proust in French, but somehow I can’t bring myself to move those books gently along.

bookshelves: montaigne,
proust in french, learn ancient greek
more ambitious then