Collections of Nothing

Over on Omnivoracious (Amazon's book blog), there's an excerpt of William Davies King's upcoming book Collections of Nothing, "part memoir, part reflection on the mania of acquisition." The lengthy excerpt is quite captivating. An excerpt of the excerpt:

I did not like what I saw under the bare bulb in that shadowy garage. There, mixed in with my necessaries, shone forth what had doomed me to a life of collecting--that super-superfluity of sub-substance. During twenty years of living with my wife, decades of relentless acquisition, I had found ways of weaving my collections into the lattice of our life. Now, brought out from concealment, arranged in heaps, not carelessly but also not artfully, these things looked like signs of hoarding, which is a diagnosis, not a hobby.