From a youth filled with constant battles with my parents about books, I had grown, or at least, stretched out, into an adult life strewn with apartments and houses, a long series of stations on the train trip through reality, filled with books.

Most of them were reference of one sort or another. Some were fiction, but of the need-to-have sort, whether I read them or not. Others were old soggy favorites, regardless of quality, and some I just liked the sound of the titles or the pictures on the covers.
Some books were shelved, others in piles, still more in boxes that I rarely opened and almost never moved, except to move.

There was a special area, though, a room, actually, with carefully shelved and catalogued books of a certain sort. They were collections of short stories. I had them arranged very specifically, anally, particularly. There were the one's I had read and would never read again. There were the one's I intended to read all the way through, but had never finished. There were the ones that I intended to begin reading some day, but hadn't started. There were the ones that I really thought I ought to read but just hadn't reached that stage in my life where the compulsion was strong or someone had mentioned the authors with enough enthusiasm. There were the ones I had no intention of reading, but I thought I should have. There were the ones I couldn't bring myself to read, but I bought because I thought it was a good way to support writers in general.

There were also the ones that I had no intention of reading, but I kept in case someone needed them or just happened to ask me if I had any of their work and I liked to be able to say I had... And then there were the ones that I had no intention of reading, or mentioning, or loaning out or even justifying my judgement by throwing them out or even burning them. Those were the ones I hated, I despised, I believed had no right to have been put on paper, in manuscript or print, let alone reprinted in three or fourteen editions. The really awful and repellant ones... The one's I'd wished I'd written.