book anxiety

When I was cleaning my room, repainting and rearranging, I decided to do something really dumb: I separated my unread books from the ones I had read.

This book-segregation finally ended last night, when I took all my books off the shelves and ended up getting very little sleep. Thank goodness. I would look at my bookshelf and instead of thinking, hey, cool beans, maybe I can read something really good today, I would feel overwhelmed. My reading went from being an escape to a chore.

Does this ever happen to you? Working in a bookstore, I feel like I have to be reading constantly so I can give people up-to-date recommendations. Not only that, but my heaps-of-books-to-read anxiety actually made me not want to buy new books.

What

is

this

madness?!

Now that my books are happily intermingling again, I think I'm on my way to getting over my book anxiety. I might even have to buy a few more, you know, to fill out my collection.

You tell me: Do you ever get book-anxiety? And how do you deal with knowing that you aren't physically able to read everything out there that you want to read?