Now, as a senior professor at the University of New Hampshire, where we are a little less pretentious, I more readily confess my gaps. Of course, I have fewer to admit to now, at least among the canonical works. But it happens just as often as it did half a lifetime ago that someone wants to talk about a book I haven’t read and ought to have read. There are more such books than ever. This is the problem we all share: keeping up.

I still meet scholars, or read books by scholars, who seem to have read everything under the sun, and that fact makes me doubt how typical I am. I am a slow reader, even when I try to read fast, which may be the effect, or perhaps the cause, of my specializing in poetry. Even if I doubled or tripled my pace, however, I cannot imagine amassing the literary knowledge these people seem to possess.

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