The problem is that it’s silly to put books that last less than a specific amount of time in reading lists. That amount of time depends upon how often you update. If I update this page every four days – any book that spends less than four days in my hands has no place in the reading list, otherwise it’s instantly obsolete. So it’s “So long weekend-fling books”. I picked you up, I read you, and I put you in the “Headed for the Curb” cardboard box. The next sunny Saturday morning that rolls around, you’re headed out with a group of your peers to be adopted by a random passer-by.

The second type are the books that you fiddle with, mull over, look at, put down, read a bit, leave for months, read a bit more, re-read part that you liked, set them down again, allow them to slide under your bed, find them again when you're under there looking for missing socks, read for a bit, carry to the living room, allow to slide under the sofa, find them again when you're under there retrieving cat toys and so on. I have a long list of this second type of book, and they can be further subdivided into two groups:

True long-term relationship books will spend the rest of your life with you. Bonhoeffer's Letters and Papers From Prison, and Marcus Aurelius' Meditations are books of this type. You pick them up, open them at random and allow them to inspire you. Also in this category are anthologies and reference books: Atlases, Timetables of History, Historical Atlases, Dictionaries, Dictionaries of Quotations, Thesauri, Style Guides, Gray’s Anatomy and old Textbooks. If you only pick up your reference books when you need to look something up, you're using them all wrong. These books are books that you are always reading and as such, it’s silly to put them in reading lists.

This leaves us with the last category. A category best illustrated by the Nelson biography over in my reading list. I’m a big Nelson fan. Every time I’m in London I go to Greenwich and stare at his shirt with the bullet hole in it. I can do without that Hamilton woman, but I’m down with Horatio. That doesn’t mean that I’m prepared to read straight through this latest biography. I’m prepared to read bits and pieces of it when the mood hits me. I’m also prepared to abandon it for months at a time. It’s no weekend fling, but I won’t be reading it forever, either – one day I will finish with it.

If the weekend-fling books, and the long-term relationship books have been deemed unsuitable for the reading list, then we are left with the Nelson Biographies of the world. We all know what they are. They’re the guy you call when nothing else interests you. I’ll refrain from labeling the relationship – you’re all thinking it, anyway.

Reading Lists are lists of these books, but these are not the dominant books in a person’s life. Weekend flings win the numbers game, and long-term relationships win the influence game. And Nelson gazes proudly from my Reading List, smugly happy in his eternal glory – arrogant little man.

Coda: Nelson inspired this piece. I began writing it on Oct. 21 – the 200th anniversary of Trafalgar, a date that brought the book in question to the fore of my attention, once again.