I have roughly 48m of bookshelves stuffed with books in my apartment¹ (not to mention 25 more books sitting on my desk for which I lack the shelf space to shelve them properly and another couple dozen waiting to go to the used book store). The bookcases covering one wall of my office are about 80% unread books which I’m making slow progress at.

A sampling of the unread books (picking the rightmost book on each of the 19 shelves of unread books): The Best American Short Stories 2020, The Riverside Chaucer, Flimsy Plastic Miracles by Ron Currie Jr, I Sailed with Magellan by Stuart Dybek, My Days of Anger by James T Farrell, Antología Poetica² by Federico García Lorca, Blurred Lines* by Vanessa Grigoriadis, Just Like You by Nick Hornby, Diaries by Franz Kafka, A Different Kind of Tension by Jonathan Lethem, A Writer’s Notebook by W. Somerset Maugham, The Magician’s Wife by Brian Moore, Father Elijah by Michael D. O’Brien, Challenging Problems in Algebra by Posamentier/Salkind, Cuentos by Alonso Reyes, All the Names They Used for God by Anjali Sachdeva, Great American Desert by Terese Svoboda, A Silent Treatment by Jeanine Vanasco and The Writer’s Notebook: Craft Essays from Tin House.

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1. Thanks to most of these being IKEA shelves, with one antique glass-doored bookcase inherited from my grandfather which has four four-foot shelves, it’s not too much of a challenge to get the exact total of shelf space which is 487.68cm. There are a few places where the shelves.

2. Yes, I read books in Spanish.