The summer of unread books

Here we are, with all our dearest unread books. We’ve spent the last eighteen winters saying: but I’ll read it next summer anyway, and unfortunately summer has arrived. It was perfect in December to invoke summer: on vacation I’ll first reread (sure, right) Crime and Punishment, but next summer, which until a few days ago was a mirage, a fraud, a fiction, has materialized in its ineluctability and asks, very bad: are you reading? You who thought you were avoiding her now have to keep your promise, in fact you look worried, because first of all you wanted to sleep, get drunk, sleep again, pass out on a beach, meet ibexes, meet your lover, run away, swim, eat, certainly not read Dostoevsky and pretend you’ve already read it. You loved pining for summer as a time to read. Now summer looks at you and says: you swore you’d reread Proust too. It was also perfect in March, at dinners, to say: these new novels that you all tell me about and that I can’t help but read, I take them to Greece because I need mental space and I’m not like you, who read hurry and without concentrating. The others nodded, even apologized for having already read, they felt guilty for being so superficial. But how, have you already read it? Not me, I’ll have it deposited until July, until August. And I imagined this poor book, even very beautiful but it was too superficial to say, fluttering in the air for months, even in the rain, without anyone being able to touch or look at it, because serious readers wait for summer, they wait for Greece and the mental space. However, Greece exists and is nearby, the mental space instead I would like to know where it is, what has changed since March. The books, meanwhile, have fallen to the ground.