I had to considerably slow things down. Part of the problem is that with nice hardcover books becoming harder to find, I bought tons of books in languages I read so that I would have a nice hardcover version before ebooks disrupt the market too much. Now that I caught up and have substantially all of the books I want in English, Russian, German, French, Italian, Classical Greek, Latin and the dead languages from the Near East that I've studied, as well as having a few books in languages that don't particularly thrill me (like Spanish, Arabic and Farsi), I figure I'm pretty well covered. The next task is to get around to reading them all.

On the other hand, I'm glad that I did buy as many books as I did, because it means I can walk over to a shelf and pick from a wide variety of books. I never know what I will end up focusing on. For example, when I bought the first books in the series on Italian history, I never thought I would get through the whole thing - I bought the later books to complete the series, and when they arrived in the mail I looked at them skeptically and said to myself, "Are you really ever going to read this?" But I did.