All the talk about the Minnesota Book Awards has got me thinking about my own literature habits. And let me be honest, I'm not very proud of them. You've heard of inveterate readers? These are people like my wife, who cannot get to sleep at night without pouring over a chapter or two of their favorite new novel. Don't get me wrong—I do plenty of reading— newspapers, plays, things like that. But when it comes to books, I guess I'm more of what you'd call a veterate reader. I'm streaky. I'll pound through a novel in a few days, and then not pick up another book for weeks at a time.

And then there's my taste in literature, which, I fear, is the sartorial equivalent of wearing stripes and plaids. I'll read a biography every once in a while to keep up my snob chops, but my weakness is a good mystery novel—or even a bad one. I've read all 21 of John D. MacDonald's Travis McGee books and the only reason I haven't gotten to Janet Evonovich's 10th Stephanie Plum story is that it doesn't come out in paperback till June. All this makes me feel bad when I think of some of my more literate friends. Marianne—who, as I'm sure you know, runs the MPR Books Forum—is smirking at me as I read this. My buddy, Jay, down in Rochester? The one who went to Princeton because that's where Fitzgerald went? Seems like he's read all of the classics—from the ancient Greeks to the European highbrows to the American greats. I'm pretty sure he's read all 16 volumes of "Remembrance of Things Past." He went into a funk for days when Saul Bellow died, and I couldn't wait to call him this week to tell him I'd been reading this great new biography of Charles Flandrau just to hear him say "who?"

But then, there's the other side of my friends and family network. When we all spend time together up at the cabin, my brother-in-law - the cop in Milwaukee—likes nothing better than to storm into the living room in the morning and yell, "Everybody quit reading!"

I know reading isn't supposed to be a competitive sport. But I can't help but feel that the computers inside our heads can hold only so much data, and much of what's on my hard drive is garbage. My brain is pretty crowded with obscure theater trivia, lines from MASH reruns and the Internet-gleaned wisdom of whatever the cultural phenomenon of the moment happens to be. For instance, at a recent get together at a friend's house, I was dazzling - well, maybe dazzle is the wrong word—I was holding forth with a string of obscure facts about how the upcoming Papal enclave will work—a subject that, two months ago, I knew nothing about. I realized that I'd been going on for a while and so I stopped and offered what's become the standard rationalization for my misplaced intellectual pursuits. I tapped my index finger to my head and said, "Ya see? No room for Proust."