The problem with binging on books is that your reading preferences are static, and given work and other considerations the amount you read is kinda fixed. So if it so happens that you go book-shopping and purchase a much larger number of books than what you can conceivably read in the next few weeks, there is the risk that by the time you get to some of the books among them, your preferences have changed and you don’t find the books interesting any more.
And because you have a pile of unread books at home (from your last few binges), you don’t feel like going and purchasing more books. And you might end up having nothing good to read. Even if you manage to overcome the sight of the stack of unread books and buy more, you will slowly accumulate a huge unread stack. Some of them might occasionally come of use later, but most just end up adorning your bookshelf. And when you are on a binge, there is a good chance that you’ve made enough poor choices that the books don’t even look good on the bookshelf.
And I just mentioned the other problem with a book binge – in your euphoria of having found so many long-awaited and exciting books, you end up picking up stuff that you would normally not pick up. You are likely to end up with a large number of good books, but they’ll also come along with a large number of poor books, thus giving a very average average to the quality of your binge. A more measured approach is less likely to result in purchase of bad books.
Of course I admit that some of the best books I’ve read are those that had been picked up accidentally during the course of some book binge. But that is far overshadowed by the number of bad books that I’ve picked up. Not necessarily “bad” but more like “not my type”. I need to restrain myself henceforth. Maybe I should give up shopping for books at book shops and switch to flipkart or something. I don’t know how that will help but I think it might.
PS: Ironically for the timing of this post, two days back, in a “measured approach” I bought one book from Crossword at Saket in Delhi (while waiting for Aadisht to turn up). A book called “7 secrets from Hindu Calendar Art” or something. Absolutely atrocious book. Zero fundaes. I suppose I got fooled by the cover and the general description and the few pages that I saw.
PS2: I wrote this post in my dreams. Well, almost. This morning I had this dream that I’m writing a post on this topic. And this was the general theme of that post. So I’ve decided to make my dream come true and am thus blogging this first thing in the morning.