Books

I wish I had as much time on my hands as this woman (NYT registration required), who tears through about three Penguin Classics a week:

In September, Ms. Gursky received a birthday gift from her husband that earned her the envy of her book-loving friends: the complete collection of the Penguin Classics Library, 1,082 books sold only by Amazon.com for nearly $8,000...

Not since Penguin started the collection in 1946, however, has anyone been able to easily compile or purchase a complete set of the books, which range from ancient Greek poetry to the novels of Thomas Pynchon and include the complete works of Shakespeare, four translations of the "Iliad," 20 volumes each of the works of Henry James and Dickens. (The complete list can be found at www.amazon.com by searching for "Penguin Classics Library.")...

Ms. Gursky's collection arrived in mid-September packed in 25 boxes, shrink-wrapped on a pallet and weighing nearly 700 pounds. Since then, Ms. Gursky has spent countless hours unpacking, shelving, categorizing, alphabetizing and rearranging the books. Oh, yes - and reading; she said she had completed more than 30 of the books in the last eight weeks. Even at that rather remarkable pace, it would take her about six years to make her way through the entire collection...

Put Ms. Gursky in the serious-reading camp. "I probably had already read 20 to 25 percent of the books on the list at some point," Ms. Gursky said. "But I like to reread books, and I like to own books I can go back and reread."

Ms. Gursky earned a master's degree in library science at the University of Chicago before returning to Los Alamos, her hometown, and shortly thereafter got a job as a librarian at the Los Alamos National Laboratory, where her husband, Richard Bolton, is a physicist. She now works in database support for the laboratory.

"We don't own a TV set," Ms. Gursky said, by way of explaining how she has had time to read a new book roughly every two days since the collection arrived. With four cats but no children, "we don't have anything better to do" than read, she said...

Ms. Gursky discounts those arguments, particularly the paperback one, noting that a collection of 1,082 hardcovers would have been prohibitively expensive. As it is, Amazon's price of $7,989.50 for the collection is discounted by 40 percent (plus free shipping) from a list price of $13,315.84.

Let's see...lives in Los Alamos, married to a physicist, no TV, no kids. If that were my life, I'd probably read all the time, too. I wonder if she'll keep up her blistering pace when she gets to War and Peace and The Brothers Karamazov, which I've had for two years and still haven't finished.