I've just done that. As of this moment, I have the following books waiting to be read:
# Mistress of Mistresses ~ E R Eddison
# Nineteen Eighty-Four ~ George Orwell
# Le Morte D’Arthur ~ Sir Thomas Malory
# One Hundred Years of Solitude ~ Gabriel Garcia Marquez
# The Eternal Champion (The Eternal Champion Vol 2) ~ Michael Moorcock
# Elric of Melniboné (The Eternal Champion Vol
~ Michael Moorcock# Orlando ~ Virginia Woolf
# Fictions ~ Jorge Luis Borges
# Never Let Me Go ~ Kazuo Ishiguro
# Wind-Up Bird Chronicle ~ Haruki Murakami
# The Night Watch ~ Sergei Lukyanenko
# The Elephant Vanishes ~ Haruki Murakami
# Birthday Stories ~ Ed. Haruki Murakami
# The Epic of Gilgamesh
# Stranger Things Happen ~ Kelly Link
# The Strange Adventures of Rangergirl ~ Tim Pratt
# The Portrait of Mrs Charbuque ~ Jeffrey Ford
# Temeraire ~ Naomi Novik
# Only Revolutions ~ Mark Z. Danielewski
# Fury ~ Salman Rushdie
# The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay ~ Michael Chabon
# Snake Agent ~ Liz Williams
# Old Man’s War ~ John Scalzi
# The Jewels of Aptor ~ Samuel R Delany
# The Chains That You Refuse ~ Elizabeth Bear
# The Bloody Chamber ~ Angela Carter
# The Ladies of Grace Adieu ~ Susanna Clarke
# The Iliad ~ Homer, trans. Robert Fagles
# The Odyssey ~ Homer, trans. Robert Fagles
# The Divine Comedy ~ Dante Alighieri
# Kafka on the Shore ~ Haruki Murakami
# Air ~ Geoff Ryman
# Trial of Flowers ~ Jay Lake
# Nova Swing ~ M John Harrison
# The Troika ~ Stepan Chapman
# Pale Fire ~ Vladimir Nabokov
# Blood Meridian; or The Evening Redness in the West ~ Cormac McCarthy
# Little, Big ~ John Crowley
# Learning the World ~ Ken MacLeod
# The Empire of Ice Cream ~ Jefrey Ford
# Secret Life: the Select Fire Remix ~ Jeff VanderMeer
# The Android’s Dream ~ John Scalzi
# Ink ~ Hal Duncan
That's forty three books. And last I checked, I usually read less than thirty books per year. Up at the top is a book I bought in August 2005; at the bottom, one I received free a couple of weeks ago. I'm currently half way through two books: Salman Rushdie's The Satanic Verses, and the collected edition of Bone, the comic by Jeff Smith.
All in all, this adds up to a Problem. If I stop buying, this pile will slowly shrink. That would be the smart choice. On the other hand, it could take me two years to read all of this, and by then there would be an equally large backlog of books I'll have missed out on. That's the greedy option, there. But when they're right there waiting for you to pick them up, it can be hard to tell yourself not to.
Thankfully I've managed to cut my buying down a lot, and might start eating into the pile if I can learn to organise my time better.
How do the rest of you avoid getting yourselves into this kind of mess? Or do you avoid it? -- Are you in the same situation as I am, with an insurmountable surplus of reading material?
I wish I had your problem. 
I enjoy Viriconium's style and atmosphere, but I find it quite an effort to read, because it doesn't seem to go anywhere. Up to the point where I stopped (somewhere in the middle of an expedition by tegeus-Cromis, the queen and friends) my favourite part of Viriconium was the very first - the moderately nonsensical, dream-like sequence with the duel and the living tapestry. 
). Have you read The Worm Oroborous yet? If so then read Eddison's trilogy! Then:
