Despite the popular notion of the used book store owner with his nose in a book, mine is mostly pressed up against the computer screen, doing an increasing volume of my business on-line, or tapping out stories and features for downstreet.net.

Between running a business and practicing my own brand of journalism, I also try to squirrel time for regular exercise, scan newspapers and periodicals like the New Yorker, Nation, American Prospect, and Harper’s. Television shows like West Wing and Ed, and some public TV offerings like the American Experience and C-SPAN’s book TV, and, occasionally, a Celtics game also eat into my time, and there are always chores around the house.

So when do I keep up with the task of reading books?

So what’s been on my reading list in the last couple of weeks? The second volume in Worcester author Nicholas Basbanes’ exploration of the world of books and bibliophiles was a treat not only for someone in the book trade, but for anyone interested in people pursuing a passion. Titled "Patience & Fortitude, A Roving Chronicle of Book People, Book Places and Book Culture," Basbanes’ newest volume is a worthy successor to his earlier, "Gentle Madness," an anecdotal report on what motivates book collectors who are highly idiosyncratic, not to say crazy.

Ann and I had the pleasure of being on hand for a talk and reading by Basbanes at the Odyssey Book Shop in South Hadley a few months back. His book is a thorough work of scholarship, but also accessible to the general reader, given Basbanes’ background as a newspaperman and book critic.

"Patience & Fortitude" contains references to the book culture in our own Five College area, including a chapter on the work and art of Barry Moser, as well as an overview of others toiling in the local book vineyard.

For a change of pace, I recently read the latest collection of short stories by Canadian author Alice Munro, who, along with the Irish writer William Trevor, is one of the very best writers of short stories. Munro’s newest collection is especially appropriate for someone my age because she writes with insight about the lives of adults - people who have experienced life in all its sweetness and all its disappointments. The final story - about a couple separated by the gulf of Alzheimer’s - is especially moving.

Among the several writers I admire and count among my friends or acquaintances is Roland Merullo, who first came into my shop perhaps a decade ago, and about whom I wrote a newspaper column when I was cranking those out. He had just published his first novel - "Leaving Losapas" - which I enjoyed, even though Merullo and others were disappointed that the great cultural arbiter, The New York Times, never reviewed it and thus it did not sell well.

Two other novels followed. Merullo has also taught part-time at Bennington College and more recently at Amherst College. He churns out a steady stream of freelance newspaper articles, criticism and magazine fictions. He and his wife Amanda and two young daughters live on the road between Williamsburg and Conway, far from their urban roots.

Merullo’s most recent book - "Revere Beach Elegy, a Memoir of Home and Beyond" - has just been published by Beacon Press and it tells me much more about Roland Merullo and his development as a writer and person than I have learned during our 10-year friendship. It is the story of a very young man, who is not now so young, who struggles to find himself emerging from the twin but contradictory environments of ethnic Revere, just north of Boston, and private secondary school and Brown University. There were many instructive and painful detours along the way, which he describes without flinching, that ultimately led him to the writing life. What is effective about the book is the extent to which the author can synthesize the lessons he has learned that provide his passage with meaning not only for him but for his readers. I found the book riveting - it could be read straight-through in a couple of days; Ann was equally enthusiastic and she’s not a fan of nonfiction.

Finally, because a customer dumped off about 30 Dick Francis mysteries, I finally read one of his books, which are always popular in my shop. The book went quickly and while the writing was not bad, I found that whatever mystery was involved did not engage me enough to warrant finishing. I used to feel that, once you started a book you had to read it to the end, like eating everything on your plate at dinner. No longer, not at my age. Life’s getting too short.

I used to acquire books for my library at home in anticipation of the time in my life when I would have more opportunity to read. There never will be such a time I have concluded. What is the point of all these books awaiting my attention?

Just inside the door to my study is a straight wooden chair on which I have been piling up books that are next in line to be read, now that the bookcase in the room can no longer accommodate more volumes.

These are serious books, which can only improve my mind if I can plow through them. So, what’s on the chair awaiting the free time I’ll never have?

Pile Number1 supports a handsome hard cover copy of Robert Caro’s classic 1,246-page work "The Power Broker, Robert Moses and the Fall of New York," first published in 1974, which I read in installments in the New Yorker when it first came out. Next is "The Crescent & Star," a recent book by New York Times reporter Stephen Kinzer about his experiences while based in Turkey for his newspaper; a biography of John Fante by Stephen Cooper called "Full of Life." Fante was a chronicler of the Italian-American experience in many novels set in 1930 and 1940s; Tim Page’s biography of Dawn Powell, a novelist whose work is coming back in favor; "Remember Me to Harlem the Letters of Langston Hughes and Carl Van Vechten,1925-1964," edited by Emily Bernard, who until this year was on the faculty at Smith College; "Titan, the life of John D. Rockefeller" by Ron Chernow, winner of the National Book Award; "Sidewalk Critic, Lewis Mumford’s Writings on New York"; and "Compass Point, How I Lived," a memoir by Edward Hoagland, novelist, essayist and natural historian.

On top of pile 2 is "Socialism" by the late Michael Harrington first published in 1976; "Tucker’s People," a novel by Ira Wolfert, about radical New York politics first published in 1943; "The Collected Poems of Paul Muldoon 1968-1998"; "Divided Minds, Intellectuals and the Civil Rights Movement" by Carol Polsgrove; a biography of Mother Jones, "The Most Dangerous Woman in America," by Elliott J. Gorn; "The Selected Stories of Alice Munro," published in 1996; "The Element of Lavishness, letters of Sylvia Townsend Warner & William Maxwell, 1938-1978." She was a writer for The New Yorker; he was her editor. Also awaiting attention are "Transfigurations, the Collected Poems of Jay Wright," a poet who lives in Vermont and whom I have gotten to know, and "Our Vietnam, the War, 1954 -1975" by A.J. Langguth, a New York Times reporter who covered the war and whose book was published in 2000. Last, but not least in terms of size, is William J. Duiker’s biography, "Ho Chi Minh," a seminal political figure of our generation.

I’m 65 years old and it would take me most of the rest of my life to get through just these volumes. And what about the books by Stendahl, Henry James, Jane Austen, Virginia Woolf, Dickens, Victor Hugo, George Eliot, Shelby Foote, Winston Churchill and Dostoyevky I have yet to read.

Books are intended to provide you with pleasure, excitement, and often comfort, but I’m beginning to get discouraged, to be depressed by my failure to read more deeply, more voraciously, more quickly.

Yet, I must press on, however halting, even lamentable, my progress.