{"id":941,"date":"2014-09-08T22:33:05","date_gmt":"2014-09-09T03:33:05","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/bojnberry.ca\/~berry\/blog\/?p=941"},"modified":"2014-09-08T22:33:05","modified_gmt":"2014-09-09T03:33:05","slug":"where-i-lament-that-i-will-not-get-to-all-7-trillion-books-on-my-to-be-read-shelf","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/bojnberry.ca\/~berry\/blog\/?p=941","title":{"rendered":"Where I lament that I will not get to all 7 trillion books on my “To Be Read” shelf"},"content":{"rendered":"

I\u2019ve become inured to the fact that I\u2019ll never read all the books that I want to read. That\u2019s fine. Really. I keep buying books with the intention of reading them, but I rarely get to them. It\u2019s not that I\u2019m not reading. I am. I\u2019ve read 25 books so far this year, admittedly less than usual, but I\u2019ve been busy. The thing is, I get excited by something, then I buy it, and if I\u2019m in the middle of another book, well then. It goes on the shelf. And then it\u2019s a crap-shoot if I ever get to it. The last five books I bought are: Scalzi\u2019s Lock In, Stross\u2019 Rhesus Chart, Carriger\u2019s Curtsies and Conspiracies, Kress\u2019 The Friday Society (That\u2019s Adrienne, not Nancy),\u00a0 <\/span>and Palahniuk\u2019s Fight Club (though I really shouldn\u2019t talk about that one). Have I read any of them? No. Am I reading, at least? Of course. I\u2019m a quarter of the way through Farmer\u2019s To Your Scattered Bodies Go, and I\u2019m probably going to read Venus on a Half-Shell next, and then probably Hitchhiker\u2019s again, because I want to see how much of the former leaked into the latter. Will I ever get to those five books I listed above? I hope so! The first three definitely, since they are known quantities, and I find Poor Ol\u2019 Bob Howard\u2019s personal dilemmas personally attractive. Fight Club, I bought because I want to take it apart and learn a bit from it, so that\u2019ll probably be read. We\u2019ll see about the Friday Society. Canadian writer though, so it has that going for it, eh?<\/p>\n

\"IMG_6598\"<\/a>

My “To Read” shelves from August 31, 2012. Alas, some of those books are still there. Even though I know they’ll be awesome…<\/p><\/div>\n

I wasn\u2019t going to read Lock In until I read The Human Division (Yes, YES. I know they\u2019re completely unrelated. But I like progressing as the author progresses. Just like me, they are hopefully practicing all the time too, and I like to see that.). Admittedly, I said the same for THD and Fuzzy Nation and Red Shirts, and I read Red Shirts first in that list. So I\u2019m obviously full of shit.<\/p>\n

One thing that I have managed is reading recent books. This year 17 of the 25 I\u2019ve read were\u00a0published in the last 15 years. The oldest was The War of the Worlds, read because I passed through Woking, and I knew I\u2019d be seeing the Fighting Machine in front of the railway station, and I wanted to relive the thing. This turned out to be an awesome idea, thank you very much, as I had frissons running down my back and goose bumps whenever I passed a sign for, say Weybridge or Shepperton. Yes. That\u2019s how it goes.<\/p>\n

\"Woking<\/a>
\n“Woking tripod<\/a>” by Warofdreams<\/a> – Own work<\/span>. Licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0<\/a> via Wikimedia Commons<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Ok, so that was actually a meaningless statement. I decided to go through my Goodreads list of the books I\u2019ve read and see how the percentages broke down. I\u2019ve been above 65% new books (new books being defined as less than 15 years old) since 2009. Before that the best I managed was 2006 (the year I started keeping track), where I hit 47%. That was also the year where 10 of the 51 books I read had been published before the 20th<\/sup><\/span> century, so go figure. I also didn\u2019t have any children that year. Also go figure.<\/p>\n

All this to say, I wish I had a time turner or something, because I want to do much more than I can actually do, and that sucks. But hey, I\u2019ll cope if you cope.<\/p>\n

\n

For the curious, here’s the list of books I have on the go right now:<\/p>\n

Physical book: Walk Softly, Witch by Carter Brown (On hiatus because I misplaced the damn thing)<\/p>\n

Physical non-fiction: The Hidden Tools of Comedy by Steve Kaplan (Suggested by Mur Lafferty)<\/p>\n

Lunch book (IE that I’ve left at work): The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman by Laurence Sterne<\/p>\n

E-Book: Mythago Wood by Robert Holdstock<\/p>\n

Audio: To Your Scattered Bodies Go by Philip Jose Farmer<\/p>\n

Erm, bio reading?: The Kick-Ass Writer by Chuck Wendig (my Doppelganger!)<\/p>\n

\n

I would recommend any of them, even Walk Softly, Witch. Total roman noir. I made it to page 40 before I lost it, and the protag has been beaten 3 times already, each time more grittily than the last. Heh.<\/p>\n

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I\u2019ve become inured to the fact that I\u2019ll never read all the books that I want to read. That\u2019s fine. Really. I keep buying books with the intention of reading them, but I rarely get to them. It\u2019s not that […] ↓ Read the rest of this entry…<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[1],"tags":[71,72],"class_list":["post-941","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-amreading","tag-hopefully","uentry","postonpage-1","odd","post-author-berry"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p1HpGK-fb","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bojnberry.ca\/~berry\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/941","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bojnberry.ca\/~berry\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bojnberry.ca\/~berry\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bojnberry.ca\/~berry\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bojnberry.ca\/~berry\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=941"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/bojnberry.ca\/~berry\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/941\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":947,"href":"https:\/\/bojnberry.ca\/~berry\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/941\/revisions\/947"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bojnberry.ca\/~berry\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=941"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bojnberry.ca\/~berry\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=941"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bojnberry.ca\/~berry\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=941"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}