Too Many Books?

Tim Parks goes into greater historical depth than I’ve seen elsewhere regarding the rising tides of available reading material (and attendant sense of overwhelm along with accompanying apocalyptic commentary).

If you’ve already got too much to read, skip to the end:

How to respond, then, to this now permanent condition of overproduction? With cheerful skepticism. With gratitude for those rare occasions when we come across a book that speaks to us personally. With forgiveness for those critics and publishers who induce us to waste our time with some literary flavor of the day. Absolutely without indignation, since none of this is anyone’s particular “fault.” Above all with a sense of wonder and curiosity at the general and implacable human determination (mine included) to fill endless space with dubious mental material when life is short and there are so many other things to be done.

Mine too, albeit somewhat more sporadically.