Getting a look at somebody’s reading habits is always interesting. Not because it reveals particular traits that may lie dormant—though people with very persnickety reading tendencies (I must read everything from the New York Times bestseller list; I can only read one book at a time) are likely to be not the most relaxed types in their everyday life—but because it lets you see something of their inner self.

And sometimes it’s fascinating just because it reminds you exactly what an important part of life the daily habit of reading books is. Take Joe Queenan’s piece from last Saturday’s Wall Street Journal, “My 6,218 Favorite Books.” In it, Queenan writes affectionately of his lifelong addiction to the daily pursuit of printed words on bound pages, and of the somewhat hopeless nature of it:

I’ve never squandered an opportunity to read. There are only 24 hours in the day, seven of which are spent sleeping, and in my view at least four of the remaining 17 must be devoted to reading. A friend once told me that the real message Bram Stoker sought to convey in “Dracula” is that a human being needs to live hundreds and hundreds of years to get all his reading done; that Count Dracula, basically nothing more than a misunderstood bookworm, was draining blood from the necks of 10,000 hapless virgins not because he was the apotheosis of pure evil but because it was the only way he could live long enough to polish off his extensive reading list. But I have no way of knowing if this is true, as I have not yet found time to read “Dracula.”

There is never enough time in the day to read even a fraction of what you want to. So what are you doing here? Get cracking. That pile on your bedside table isn’t going to get any smaller the longer you waste on the Internet.