Why can’t I ever read one book at a time? Start, read, finish, and put away? Is it like this for everyone? On my desk are at some thirty-five new books that I am at least two chapters in to, some far more, but I do not seem to want to finish any of them. Somehow, knowing that they are undone keeps them alive and still in the process of deep communion. Once the cover is closed and all the words have been read, there is a death.

I’m reminded that John Irving’s intense passion for Dickens includes an unread book. I don’t know if it’s still true, but I recall him saying that he’s saving Our Mutual Friend, the last completed novel, until his deathbed. Irving wants Dickens to ever be an ongoing pleasure, one that’s never quite finished, a hunger never completely satisfied.

I’ve recently gotten the new Van Gogh: The Life, along with the Penguin edition of his letters. After recently visiting the house north of Paris where he died, I couldn’t resist the gargantuan and acclaimed study. And, well, his letters are among his prized leavings.

I collect short books, but they are apparently no easier to finish. Train Dreams by Denis Johnson and Brooklyn Is by James Agee, both beautiful little hardcover volumes of 116 and 50 pages, respectively, have been sampled, more than sampled, yet I know that when I finish them and so would be free to remove them from the pile of the “living” to a shelf behind me, a loss will inhabit the desk. So I refuse to do it, and have learned to read books paragraph by paragraph while the piles get taller.

As if I needed to add anything else to a work table straining under the weight, I picked up at a local bookshop on a recent trip to Ohio, Philip Roth’s Nemesis, his novel about a fictitious polio epidemic in Newark in the summer of 1944. I remember polio victims. There are was a girl in my class in Cleveland when I was growing up a decade after Roth’s story. He is a writer I find extremely easy to read. His narratives flow like rivers, and you find yourself twenty, thirty, sixty pages in before you come up for air. This book I will probably finish, just because he rarely lets you do otherwise.

Recently — why him? why now? — I’ve begun to read Malamud again after decades. His biography by Philp Davis, an excellent work that did something, but apparently not enough, to raise the novelist to his former stature, is riveting and supremely intelligent. Now I find that I can’t help but dredge out the novels and stories I read so long ago. They are dense. No hope to skim them away. They’re now taking up yet more real estate on my desk.

The Civil War, anything on the Civil War! The Great Rebellion, the War Between the States, was far more my war than Korea, under which I was born; I was eight at its centennial, and my brother and I played Civil War in our backyard, in the woods across the road, in our shared bedroom, in our minds. And to truly know the war one must know what led to it, so now . . . The Impending Crisis: America Before the Civil War 1848-1861 has taken its place in the stack — right between Hemingway’s Boat and Thomas W. Nason: New England Virtues Aged in Wood, a monograph on the woodcut artist by Charles Price, published by the Florence Griswold Museum in Old Lyme, Ct, a place I was happy to visit a couple of weeks ago.

And it never ends. Which I guess is how I prefer it.