I wish that I could justify slovenliness and that my wife didn't have to occasionally remind me to "straighten up my nest." Plunging cats that scatter books like ninepins don't help.

Decisive souls seem to quickly settle on themes and pursuits for life and happily camp there. From childhood they determine what they will be when grown, a question that still befuddles me. So I graze among the books within reach, driven and tossed by the mood de jour.

And what are these books which persist in creeping away from the recliner? The subjects vary widely, an indicator perhaps of my lifelong difficulty in being able to make up my mind.

Tonight I'm a clever sleuth tackling a tough nut case chronicled in RIVALS OF SHERLOCK HOLMES, a collection of 40 short stories whose detectives competed with Arthur Conan Doyle's famous hero more than a century ago.

Yesterday found me tramping through 17th century England (CROMWELL: THE LORD PROTECTOR) following Oliver Cromwell in his rise to power.

Of necessity, BEATING CANCER WITH NUTRITION tugs at me because of our daily battles with this pernicious disease. But each self-proclaimed author/expert has pet theories that persistently run cross-grain to those of the next. Confusing. Are there no precise answers? And how do we decide which to believe?

Another sort of detective intrigues me: archeological giants who bested theretofore unresolved conundrums of the earth. GODS, GRAVES AND SCHOLARS empowers my mind's eye to observe Champollion decipher the Rosetta stone, Carter unearth the tomb of Tutankhamen, Schliemann excavate Troy. Persistence pays a good reward.

Occasionally grounded in reality, though, I browse SPECIAL EDITION USING FILEMAKER 8, 900 pages of meaty instruction on database software that people occasionally pay me to use. Here I pick and choose sections at random rather than working from cover to cover as normal readers are wont to do.

How did the ancients keep time? SUNDIALS: THEIR THEORY AND CONSTRUCTION explains this oversimplified implement so that even the computer literate in this digital age can understand. Ignore the underlying equations and trigonometry if you like.

But of all the books in my stack, THE BIBLE wins top honors for value. And if I exercise diligence, it agreeably yields up treasures of the doctrine, reproof, correction and instruction I need to survive.

Puzzling habits and tastes, you conclude. Agreed. But the relentless perplexities and pressures of life frequently render me unable to connect even two meaningful thoughts. So I graze from topic to topic seeking comfort, insight, escape and edification.

Inevitably, the relentless effects of gravity and time will transmogrify even my most carefully arranged stack of books into a lava flow. So I rein it in again—and even swap its membership to better suit my circumstances.

When life buries us with a mountain of trouble, the right book is a worthy shovel. And there are many such mountains.