Now did you guess the

acronym? Yes? No?
Book Advancement Beyond Life Expectancy. BABLE. Does that sound familiar? I suppose I could turn it into BABEL - Book Advancement Beyond Expected Life but I prefer BABLE. It has a certain quality about it.
Oh yes BABLE. The Senior Cat and I suffer from it. He still has books he wants to read...many of them. That apparent blip in last week's heat was not really a blip at all. He had things there to read. Yesterday he asked me whether I could order something from the library for him. He had been reading a review of it.
Like the dutiful daughter I am I have added it to the list of books I have asked the library to get for me. There are nineteen on that at the moment. (The maximum you are allowed on your waiting list is twenty.)
I know he went into the local bookshop early last week - before the heat struck - and asked them to order something for him. I don't know what the book was but one of the staff mentioned the fact when I was in there on Saturday morning.
More books? We don't need them! We have thousands of them here.  No, perhaps we do need them.
"You could get rid of most of these," my sister tells me. She reads but not in the way we do. She does not accumulate books.
"We could clear this out," says a friend of the Senior Cat. He is serious. This friend does not read apart from searching the internet for information about vehicles and extra-terrestrial sightings. He genuinely cannot understand why anyone keeps books. "But you can read it all on line!" 
But then there are other people who will ask, "You don't happen to have a copy of....?" or "I need to know how to..." The Senior Cat will say, "Wait a minute..." He will go to the shelves and, more often than not, he will find the book or a book. It will be used again - and again.
Novels get loaned out to people going on holiday. Occasionally they get given away - but only the light-weight "read in an evening" sort of novel.
But yes, BABLE still happens. There are the Christmas and birthday books we get given because people think we need to read them. There are the books we want to read.
Another blogger once told me he thought I must have the longest avatar on the internet. Yes, that pile of books I am perched on is long. It is probably dangerously unstable, especially as it keeps growing ever higher.
But it stills seems to me that suffering from BABLE is no hardship at all. Everyone should suffer from BABLE.