Umberto Eco (1932–2016) was famous for having one of the world’s great libraries. It contained about 30,000 volumes and knocked the socks off pretty much everybody who saw it. (There’s a video here of the Foucault’s Pendulum author wandering through it.)

Did he read all those books? Of course not. As Nassim Nicholas Taleb pointed out in The Black Swan, that’s a good thing. Here’s Taleb quoted by Maria Popova:

The writer Umberto Eco belongs to that small class of scholars who are encyclopedic, insightful, and nondull. He is the owner of a large personal library (containing thirty thousand books), and separates visitors into two categories: those who react with “Wow! Signore professore dottore Eco, what a library you have! How many of these books have you read?” and the others — a very small minority — who get the point that a private library is not an ego-boosting appendage but a research tool. Read books are far less valuable than unread ones. The library should contain as much of what you do not know as your financial means, mortgage rates, and the currently tight real-estate market allows you to put there.

Keep collecting those books, as long as space and money allow. You’ll get to them. Eventually.