I’m a completist. I don’t know why. I don’t know when it started. All I know is that when I find something that I enjoy, and it appears in a series, I have to complete it.

My latest obsession is with New York Review Books (NYRB) Classics. I read one (Stoner by John Williams), loved it, and decided to see what else was in the series. I’d find one at Half Price Books (“Oh, this looks interesting, too!), buy it, and put it next to the previous one. This process repeated itself until now, where I find myself wanting (daresay, needing) to collect the whole series.

I know this is crazy. I won’t read every single book immediately or even like all the ones I read. But that’s not the point, which is to complete the collection.

I’ve done the same thing with the Best American Series (Short Stories, Travel, Science and Nature, Essays, Non-required Reading, Poetry) and the O. Henry series. Have I read any one volume of those all the way through? You can safely bet no. There was even a time I collected all the Shakespeare plays in individual volumes by a certain publisher because I liked the woodcuts used on the covers. This is ridiculous because I have many copies of his plays in anthologies scattered throughout the house. Do I really need four copies of Hamlet? Apparently, the answer is yes.

The completist in me is not something new. I collected baseball cards, coins, stamps, records, etc. when I was younger. I never saw it before as a problem, which makes worrying about it now kind of crazy.

The cliched saying is that if you know you’re crazy, then you’re not crazy. Then what am I? Perhaps being a completist is a type of crazy that’s more accepted in society, or at least it was. Hoarders has spoiled that game. Now when I bring a new NYRB book home because it’s part of “the collection,” my plus-one rolls her eyes, silently saying cuckoo cuckoo.

Or maybe I’m obsessing too much on the obsessing. I should focus on the pleasure I get from these books beautifully aligned on my shelf, knowing they are ready for me when I’m ready for them. I should obsess on the knowledge that I have a lifetime of reading ahead of me.

And I will, just as soon as I finish completing this collection.

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