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There's books you read through and books you read around in - obviously the latter are usually long, dense, episodic and/or anthologic. Sometimes you read around so much that you've gone through the whole book twice over - though you often can't be sure. (I distinguish these from the many volumes or authors whose parts I may be reading out of order but am deliberately trying to plow through, therefore usually manage to do so after a while; this is the crucial distinction, for me: books where you're reading entirely to read, rather than to have read.) Some of these stay by your bed for years. Here are some of my longest-serving bed books, vaguely chronologically, starting in 1994:


Gore Vidal's United States: Collected Essays 1952-1992
Various Thurber books
Wilde (Comp. Works, Artist as Critic prose collection, Letters)
Various Norton Anthologies (best are 6th ed. for English, 3rd for American)
Voltaire (Mod. Lib. paperback, Phil. Dictionary, English Letters, story volumes)
Shaw's Prefaces
V.S. Pritchett's Coll. Essays (abandoned on discovery of Bloom c. 1998)
Bertrand Russell's History of Western Philosophy
Russell's other books
Nietzsche - mostly the old Mentor reader
Byron's Letters and other prose, Penguin ed. & others
Cambridge Encyclopedia of Philosophy
Phoenix & Phoenix II
Harold Bloom's many books and anthologies
Palm at the End of the Mind
Kafka's Diaries
Leaves of Grass
Emerson, Modern Library College Ed. & various others
Dickinson's poems, Johnson's edition, later Franklin's
Library of America poetry anthologies - 2v for 19c, 2v for first half of 20c
Several editions of Hazlitt

And a stack of Borges, who I'm now reading through a bit more systematically, finding I've actually missed many things (among others I've read six+ times).

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More strange convergences of favorites: "The Argentine Ant" is exactly halfway between I Had Trouble in Getting to Solla-Sollew & Woman in the Dunes.

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Another bricknote through my window from the obvious: that "Walking" passage is behind "Directive"!

Which makes the "Directive" house-no-more-a-house and Edgewood cousins. Which of course they are.

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Another one: "House of Asterion" is Borges' rewrite of Kafka's Metamorphosis, the great masterpiece of self-pity.