Suppose I go into a first class restaurant for a lovely lunch. The waiter gives me the menu and it is 500 pages of small print. Wow! What a forest of choices! Each item is accurately described and hundreds sound delicious. This is a modern place with good service and offers tiny samples of some of the foods. I do try a few and they are truly wonderful. The lunch hour, the afternoon, the evening all go by while I read and think. That is what I call "all menu and no meal".
I wonder if I will get sleepy and ready for bed before having a meal.
I find myself in this position more and more. I have 538 items in my Kindle archives. Those 538 are "in the cloud" and can be downloaded to any of my devices. My Kindle has 293 items on it. Any of those can be read at any time. Each of those items is promising and seems like a good bet for me, my tastes, current interests, background, etc. I chose each and I paid for each. Yet, when Amazon lets me know about a "great sale", I browse through what is offered. My sister once told me,"Bill, 70% off! You have to buy!", meaning that now or later, I would be happy to have one or more of the items on sale and now was the time to get them at a lower price than later. I wasn't interested in clothes but I am interested in books.
So, I spend time many days looking through the offerings at Amazon. I realize that books for 99¢ are often about a lovely male chest on a dashing and handsome officer that will not interest me at all. However, some of the books that haven't sold well are just what I have been looking for.
So, I spend more time, I'm afraid, shopping and purchasing and squirreling away 'for later' than I do reading. I think the problem is spreading. There are more and more channels of tv and more and more caches of old shows that I might want to explore. There are too many You-Tube videos for me to watch in this lifetime but some of them are not to be missed. More and more podcasts, music, places to go, other restaurants to try, recipes to cook, ways and places to exercise.
The discipline of a job and career, the physical limits of the number of books I could carry used to help me stay within sensible limits. Now I wander more, much more. I may fall asleep to escape all the possibilities.
