If you can manage to read three novels a day, you might just about stay afloat, but then what about the previous years’ floods, only a little smaller as you go back year by year?

The problem deserves a name: the indelegability of reading, perhaps, or the inclonability of the mind. Other people cannot read for us, and there is only one of each of us. Good writers are legion, but we read alone.

Novels and stories, and plays and poems, are hardly the end of it. For literature professors, there is literary theory, much of it laborious, and philosophy and psychology and history and sociology. For those of us who try to be good citizens, there are books and articles on Syria and China, nuclear weapons and global warming, health care and poverty. I feel obliged now and then to read about how the world economy functions and how we can bring it under control—more heavy work. Sheer curiosity leads me to dip into string theory and artificial intelligence. I have hobbies: I read about Homer and Troy and historical linguistics just for fun.

Most of us read like this. And then we have lives, too, and must sleep and eat and go to a movie, teach classes and go to department meetings, and be a parent to our children and a friend to our friends. If all that sounds banal, it should at least remind us of an ideal that many of us still wistfully avow: well-roundedness. We want to be worthy heirs of the science and culture of the world, knowing enough of them to place their parts in proper relationship. It would be interesting to know when the last man (or woman) of leisure managed to read everything important. It must have been at least two centuries ago; it might have been Montaigne. In 1927, Virginia and Leonard Woolf took part in a BBC broadcast on the topic “Are too many books written and published?” Eighty-seven years later, the question hardly needs to be raised.

—Michael Ferber, Too Many Titles, The Chronicle of Higher Education.