Checking out a library book is an optimistic action. It suggests hope in the idea that time will be found to simply sit somewhere comfortable and be immersed in a story. You check out a book because you love the idea of it, or the cover is appealing, or it’s written by an author you’ve enjoyed before. “Read this,” suggests someone whose taste you admire, so you hunt the book down at the library and bring it home. A NYT review, a spot on NPR, a review on your favorite book blog: It’s so easy to find books to read and then to fill yourself with anticipation, both for the reading itself and for the solitude, the quiet, the comfort.

And then life gets in the way.

I think my ratio of books checked out to books I actually manage to finish is about 12:3. I want to read them, every single one, but I also have to live. I fit in as many books as I can, but there is so much to be done with every minute of time. In any given hour, I could do 18 different things, each of them important, and quite often the thing I pick isn’t reading. I remember once, when I was about 15 or 16, sitting on the floor in a hall of my high school, a teacher stopped next to me and said, “You know, when you grow up, you’ll have to stop reading all the time.”

(Obviously not an English teacher.)

He made being a grown up sound like a desolate wasteland. A book drought. A literature void.

I’m reminded the most in the summer that maybe growing up wasn’t the best thing I could’ve done. Remember how, in the summers of your childhood, you had all that free time? I think most kids probably filled it with running around with other kids, or baseball, or tennis. I did some of that, too, but mostly what I did was recline in a lawn chair in the shade by the peach tree and read. Book after book after book.

Every summer I long to go back to those days. I illustrate this desire by checking out books, and there’s always a pile by my nightstand and a pile in the front room and a couple stacked on the kitchen table. I want to read all of them, I try to finish more, but eventually they are overdue, and then they can’t be renewed another time, and then I have to return them.

But I don’t want to forget them.

Here’s a list of the 14 books I’m returning, unread, so that maybe I will remember, in the face of all the other books that will grab my attention, to check them out again:

The Violet Hour: Great Writers at the End by Katie Roiphie. An exploration of the dying days of writers and artists. I am a little obsessed with death lately.

Godforsaken Idaho by Shawn Vestal. I discovered this short story collection while looking for books to add to the library’s book group sets. I don’t think it would be a good choice for my library:  short stories with a decidedly un-Mormon twist. (That’s Joseph Smith on the cover.) I did read the first story, about an imagined afterlife, and found it dry and witty and delicious.

Weathering by Lucy Wood. A multigenerational novel about a grandmother, her daughter, and her daughter. One of them is a ghost whose remains are swirling in the river near her home.

Deathless by Catherynne M. Valente. A reimagining of the Russian folktale of Koschei the Deathless.

We are Water by Wally Lamb. The story of a woman who, after decades of marriage and family life, falls in love with another woman.

Fates and Furies by Lauren Groff. I confess: this is now the third time I’ve checked out and returned this book, which is an exploration of contemporary marriage. Perhaps it is just not the right time and I should give it up for good? Until it comes into my life again?

The Bitter Side of Sweet by Tara Sullivan. A teen novel about a boy named Amadou, who is working on a cocoa planation in the Ivory Coast to pay off his inexplicable debt. Did I not read it because I was afraid it would make me give up chocolate?

The Radleys by Matt Haig. A vampire novel. No one sparkles. This is more about family dynamics than blood drinking, but the bloody parts might be an interesting twist.

Almost Famous Women by Megan Mayhew Bergman. Some of the women in these stories are almost famous because of their proximity to famous people. Others because they almost make it. I’m kind of in love with short stories lately.

Thanks for the Trouble by Tommy Wallach. I loved his We All Looked Up, so I took this one home when I found it on the new YA books display. The description is sort of vague, a boy who doesn’t speak much and always avoids going to school meets an enigmatic girl.

Jimmy Bluefeather by Kim Heacox. The story of a Tlingit native, Keb Wisting, and the adventure he has with his grandson, whose injury at a logging mill ends his basketball aspirations. I got about twenty five pages into this but then got distracted, but the story is still tugging at me.

The Mare by Mary Gaitskill. I like what Maureen Corrigan said about it: “a raw, beautiful story about love and mutual delusion, in which the fierce erotics of mother love and romantic love and even horse fever are swirled together.” What more could one want from a novel?

The Golem and the Jinni by Helen Wecker. I read the first chapter of this as an e-book and I liked it too much to not read the book-book. But then I decided to just order my own copy to take on my trip next week. Why haven’t I returned it yet?

The Year’s Best Science Fiction: The 32^nd Annual Collection. I have no idea why I requested this. For three or four years in the early 90s, I bought this every year. Then I realized I would never get through them all and I stopped. I think there is a story in there I wanted to read. Hopefully I will figure out which one.

All of these, along with five books about traveling in Europe, two books about lupus, and one cookbook, are all finally being returned to the library today. Hopefully someone else will be compelled to take one (or five) of them home. And actually read them.