A Book Without Rooms

"Ah, yes." I aspirate as I look at my six volumes of The Modern Library Classics edition of In Search of Lost Time (formally translated as A Remembrance of Things Past ) by that madeleine-loving, cork-lined-room-inhabiting, literary-giant Marcel Proust. "Ah, yes" is a typical sigh of mine. I am thirty years old, overweight, gay, Midwestern, anxious, loquacious, and, maybe most of all, seemingly incapable of cracking open a book and reading it. I suppose I consider myself shallow. Over the years, I have collected a number of works from museum and library book sales, yard sales, Goodwill browsing, and the like with the earnest desire to maybe, someday read one of these books. And I had curated quite a library by the time I went to college. I hauled these aspirational reads with me. By the time I was out of college and living back at home (ah, yes,) I had doubled my "to-read" collection. And then when I moved to Saint Louis, I carried that with me only t