What was I talking about last week?

Oh yes. Books and the fact I've got a few. A few too many. In fact, spurred on by the last column, I thought I'd count them. Well, not count every one of them. That would take me ages. And I'm a busy man. There are children to shout at. And so I haven't got ages. In any sense of the word.

Still, at least I can try to approximate how many there are. To do this I counted shelves. We have 21 bookshelves in the house (I'm not including the ones in the kids' rooms or the ones in our bedroom which are used almost exclusively by J). I reckon there's maybe 30 books per shelf. That makes 630 books (1).

Now - and I'm being generous here - let's imagine 100 of those belong to J. Another 100 will be books I've read already, or reference books. So that means there are 430 books to be read. Add another 150 on the floor and on top of the bookcases - and I'm being very ungenerous with that number - and you've got somewhere in the region of 580 unread books.

Hardly a library, is it? Even so, how much reading does that represent? Quite a lot. I reckon I read one book a week. Maybe two. So at the very, very least we're talking 265 weeks to get through them all.

But then you offset that with work-related reading (2) and that probably bumps it up to 300 weeks. Which is almost six years worth of reading. And that's if I don't purchase any more books between now and 2019. I'll be 56 by then and if I just read what's in the house it means I still won't have got round to War And Peace or Proust. But I will have read three books about Spanish football.

And now I'm beginning to wonder if that matters. At what age do you accept the truth that you're never going to get round to Finnegans Wake? And is that an admission of failure or simple realism?

The problem is all these calculations have put another unwanted thought in my head. It's possible that somewhere on my bookshelves lurks the last book I'll ever read. What a morbid thought. What if it's something rubbish? Or worse, something good? When I was a kid I used to worry I'd die before the end of the football season and never know if my team had won the league.

Now this new niggle has developed in which I worry I'll die halfway through 50 Shades Of Grey. Can you imagine the embarr-assment? I suppose I won't be around to feel it.

FOOTNOTES

[1] Some of the shelves are double stacked but frankly that just complicates things and my arithmetic isn't that good.

[2] Yes, I have read Danniella Westbrook's autobiography if you must know.

Twitter: @teddyjamieson