When I was a child, I was fascinated by tales of the childhoods of famous people. It seemed most of them had read every book in their local libraries, starting with the first book on the top shelf, and finishing with a book written by someone whose name began with "Zz." I decided to do that myself once or twice, but inevitably I found that there were a lot of books on that top shelf that didn't interest me at all. And there wasn't time to read bad books. Heck, there wasn't time to read good books. I was told to "get your nose out of that book and run outside and play," or, even more puzzlingly, to "put down that book and come watch TV with the family." Never enough time to read.

As I grew older, I found ways to fit reading into my day. I always carried a book with me, and read for the few minutes after I got to a classroom but before class started. I read walking to and from school. I finished in-class assignments as quickly as I could, and then read my novels. I read under the guise of doing homework, thus avoiding those family nights around the television. Still, never enough time to read.

Things got better in college, where I was an English major and it was actually my job to read. But it's astonishing to me now how little reading I actually did, even though the volume of reading was enormous. I never read classics like George Eliot's Middlemarch, never made it through Moby-Dick (and haven't to this day), never tackled a novel in translation by a Spanish, French or Russian novelist. Between the debate team and my pre-law attempt to study a little of everything, there was never enough time to read.

Time disappeared entirely in law school and during the years I practiced law, it seemed. I read on my commute, I read at lunch (when I was able to stop for lunch), I read in line at the Department of Motor Vehicles and while waiting for doctors' appointments and on (rare) vacations. Evenings were short (and sometimes nonexistent outside the office), but I read then when I wasn't so tired I had no energy for anything more than -- you guessed it -- television. Never enough time to read.

Right now I'm on a leave of absence from my career. I have every day, all day, all night, to read as much as I'd like. Aside from four to six hours a week for various appointments, a few more hours to fix my husband a home-cooked meal occasionally, and another few for errands and the like, I am allowed to do nothing but read.

And yet -- and yet -- there's still never enough time to read. I will probably not be able to read all the books in my personal library (about 8000 volumes strong and growing almost daily) before I die, even if I live to be 100. And my library doesn't include a number of books I want to read -- my Amazon wish list is 700+ items strong, for instance. I use the local library, too, but more times than not I wind up returning books before I've read them, because of course I can't really read 45 books in three weeks. There is still not enough time.

I hope desperately that Jorge Luis Borges was right, and that heaven is a type of library. I want to spend all of time and beyond time reading everything written and to be written, side by side with my husband. I can think of no better way to spend eternity.