1000 books

For about 10 years, I've been keeping track of all the books I own in a database, and my major goal has been to reach 1000 entries. (It's actually more than a thousand books, because I own several multi-volume editions, such as the complete novels of Jane Austen, but entries are a lot easier to count!)

And I finally did it! Of course, I celebrated by buying more books. My to-be-read stack is now 190 books strong, and somehow never seems to get smaller. I try to buy more slowly than I read ... but seriously. How do you possibly?

On the "in process" list right now I have: Prose and Poetry of the American West and The Aeneid by the bed; Zane Grey's Woman of the Frontier and The Big Sky by A. B. Guthrie, Jr., in the car; and I'm in the middle of Caramelo by Sandra Cisneros. Prose and Poetry is a slow, hit-or-miss kind of thing (it's an anthology, after all). The Aeneid and the two Westerns I've read before, although I don't remember The Big Sky dragging quite as much as it seems to be this time around. And Caramelo can't seem to decide if it's fiction or fictionalized, which is quite distracting while you're trying to read. I'd like to be concentrating on the story, not whether it's true or not true, and the endnotes to her chapters (odd in a fiction) really pull me out of the narrative flow.