Books You Never Read.

I suspect that all of us have books on our bookshelf that we have never read. I expect that some were given as presents by people who had no idea what our reading tastes are, or are books that we bought at sometime or another because they were fashionable but we never got around to reading. In that respect, I admit to having owned a copy of 'The Selfish Gene' by Richard Dawkins that I have never read and probably never will. Then there are classic works of one sort or another that we may have bought at sometime hoping to improve our minds but then gave up the effort. Anything by James Joyce often comes into that category, and probably for the generation radicalised in the 1960s and 70s, 'Das Kapital', although from what one hears, given the current state of the world economy, study of the latter may well be becoming fashionable again. Then there are the vast selection of cookery and self improvement books again given as presents by reletives anxious that we should improve our culinary skills, or our emotional intelligence, but end up gathering dust when old habits prove too hard to break.

So these volumes end up untouched while our shelves get taken over by well thumbed copies of the works of Jack Higgins, or possibly the collected writings of Emma Blair. All our unread literary good intentions end up on the back shelf of the bookcase ready to be passed on via the next car boot sale to yet more people who will never read them.