The greater challenge is reading a book that no one else has read. I’ve come ridiculously close, but never the coveted ’1 person.’ Certainly I can go to an academic institution and pick up, say, Micro- and Nano-Structured Multiphase Polymer Blend Systems: Phase Morphology and Interface with the assurance that I’ve beaten my peers to the punch. Without an interest in the book, though, it’s a shallow victory.

Tonight, though, I picked up a new book I can truly call mine: Sir Charles Grandison by Samuel Richardson. It’s 1600 pages of epistolary moralist sludge, but I want to read it because I’m a literary adventurer. A book is a mountain, and it must be my flag at its summit! Sir Charles Grandison promises that. The Wikipedia link above demonstrates no one gives a damn about this book. It’s already defeated the previous owner of this book, Case Western Reserve University’s English Department chair Dr. Siebenschuh. About halfway through the book the annotations he makes conspicuously disappear, as if he thought one night, ‘Screw it—analysing this makes literary criticism more futile than normal.’

See you at page 1600!