"I think it's time you took the bookmarks out"

"

OK, honey, we need to talk. I think you know what this is about. That's right, all the books. Look, I know you have a "thirst for knowledge" but really..you can't be simulatneously reading 11 books at once. I've run out of business cards because you keep using them to mark your page. Just take a peek at our shelves over there. What do you see? Other people's bookshelves do not have a dozen bookmarked novels still in the shelf, do they? If they aren't able to to finish something, they at least accept it and take the bookmark out. But not you, no. You're content to live with the delusion that you're "get around to it" one day. Well, honey, let me ask you: when do you think you're going to "get around" to finishing 'Rogue', the novel written by Fabio? It's been gathering dust for 3 years now and you're not even halfway through.

Come on: let's be realistic. What are the chances of you finishing all those books you bought this time last year and only read a few chapters of? Oh, come on, I think it's more like zero per cent. What, so you think you can finish Daniel Dennett's 'Freedom Evolves', Merlin Donald's 'A Mind So Rare', Gerald Edelman's 'Wider than the Sky'...What? Just because he won the Nobel Prize doesn't mean you owe him! OK, well what about Deacon's 'the Symbolic Species'?

And what are we to do with all these new books you keep buying, eh? Even if we both started reading them we'd never get through them all in time for Christmas, when you tell all your relatives to get you books! This is a serious problem, darl.
You don't seem to be understanding what I'm getting at. Just this week you've added Eric Campbell's Absurdistan, Jenna Jameson's Neil Strauss-ghostwritten autobiography, Jared Diamond's 'Guns, Germs and Steel' and Robert Manne's Whitewash! Where in the hell are you going to have the time to read all of them? Right, so you're going to give up your job at the coal mines is that it? Well, how selfish. That black lung is what we live on and now you want to throw it away for few measly pieces of paper.

I don't know what to say. Don't make me give you an ultimatum. Yes, I would actually; and I hope I would win out in a decision where the other option is your precious books. Oh, really? Well...if that's the way you feel, fine. Leave....No, I don't really mean that. I love you, it's just..look, take a walk to cool off, can you do that for me? What's that? Yeah I know, if I want you, you'll be at the library.

"