dreaming bittersweet

Seen variously, and trying to go with the first titles to mind, per category---

1. Lust, books I want to read for their cover.

So much of my reading of the past decade-plus has been in electronic formats, and so many of my grad-era books were monographs or editions deprived of their paper slipcovers by library staff, that---sorry, artists---I've kind of stopped looking at covers for potential appeal. I can appreciate them as standalone art!

2. Pride, challenging books I've finished.

Joyce, Finnegans Wake

...Either half the stuff I read in (and for) grad school was challenging, or none of it was. Never mind finishing things, a restriction which might limit a person's attempts to start, and never mind the C20/21 bias regarding text-boundaries (what is one unit of "books"?).

For example, for me it was more of a challenge to have worked carefully through any one small chunk of skaldic verse than to plod through Joyce on my own. We wouldn't say I can't consider my dips into Íslendingasögur cumulatively challenging because I've met only parts of the modern edition's three volumes, or if we did, I'd say that it encompasses a bunch of things published in separate smaller books as standalone-ish texts (see below, sloth). Small bonus for most dips into skaldic verse having occurred via a once-monthly evening reading group, where I was often youngest and always the attendee with the least familiarity with Scandinavian languages.

That's probably Pride: challenging literary theory I've ingested and reflected back, with a detour around Lodge's game of Humiliation (see BoardGameGeek, or quotation and musings by a random emeritus prof).

3. Gluttony, books I've read more than once.

Years ago, each of them, but:

Smith, The 101 Dalmatians
Wrede and Stevermer, Sorcery and Cecelia
the Penguin translation into English of Geoffrey of Monmouth's History of the Kings of Britain

4. Sloth, books on my to-read list the longest.

Dante's Inferno
Njáls saga (see above, pride)
Spolsky, The Languages of the Jews

5. Greed, books I own multiple editions of.

Somehow I've accreted several Beowulfs (editions, not counting multiple translations) despite not being terribly fond of it as a text. I may still have a second copy of The Owl Service.

6. Wrath, books I despised.

Ehh, not worth the effort of wordmaking (carried mostly by crashy Microsoft Voice Access).

7. Envy, books I want to live in.

...No? When I was 10-11 and wrote one (1) unfinished crossover fanfic, I moved published writers' characters around amongst the different settings. I didn't put myself in; no one resembling me would've survived those settings.