Brother Benedict

Books I've read? Hundreds. Maybe thousands. Probably millions. There aren't enough fingers on human beings on this Planet Earth to count how many books I've read. The books I've read, if you were to gather them all in one place, would stand taller than Mount Everest, wider than the Grand Canyon, and beefier with intellectual platinum than any of those (who knows how many?) Illuminati-Intelligentsia libraries scattered across the globe.

So many books - millions of billions, times several trillion - yet none of them matter. I've forgotten nearly every one of them. From the illustrated children's book I read just a week ago, with gorgeous woodcut plates dating from the 7th century, following the adventures of a precocious...what was it? A frog? Bogmouse? Raven? Who knows: I haven't the patience or time to search my memory.

All that matters now is the books I'm reading now. It may seem, via the interface of this inferior web service, that I'm only reading two or three at a time. This illusion is for your benefit. If your screen were to be flooded with the dozens times-and-beyond dozens that I read concurrently, not only would your screen be full to the point of allowing no other content, but almost certainly the feeble servers keeping Booklikes alive would fry like sausage during Oktoberfest.

Why do I tell you this? Perhaps simply so you may know that such an unparalleled reader exists, and you can then either aspire to untouchable literary prowess or, more reasonably, abandon all hope. The future is yours.

Make your decision knowing this: in the time it took you to read this, I finished four books, am already halfway through two others, and still had the time to scoff at a young woman reading a celebrity magazine. Good luck, and good reading.

Brother Benedict