I was recently looking at my Amazon wishlist, it has quite a few books on it, and wondering when, if ever, I’d get around to purchasing and reading them. See, I made a deal with myself, and I’ve mostly kept it, that I won’t buy anymore new books until I finish all the ones I already have on my shelves. But, it doesn’t seem to matter how many of the books I take off the shelf and read there are always unread ones sitting on the shelves waiting for their turn. If reading wasn’t so enjoyable the task might be Sisyphean…
So, I decided to sit down and see just how many books I have to read before I can get to those new ones… It took awhile but here it is:
171 books
Roughly, I didn’t count a lot of the genre fiction collections I have lying around (Dune, Stross, Stevenson, Weeks, etc…) If you want to get a glimpse at what I’m interested in go ahead and click through to the spreadsheet, I didn’t list authors but some simple googling should lead you to these books.
Anyone have any suggestions on whittling this down to something manageable?
Oooh, good list. Reminded me I want to read Foucault’s Pendulum. Another funny thing: some of the ‘wanna read’ books on your list were on my same list for ages, and then I read ’em, and they weren’t so great, OR some of them were so splendiferous that I was sorry I hadn’t read them sooner. My advice: live a long time. That way you’ll get to them eventually. Keep the books, since you have the room anyway, and use the UCD library more. I’m reading 1491 in Spanish, but was rough going, so I bought the English version, and now I switch off according to mood. Meanwhile someone gave me Darwin’s Dream Pond: The Fish of Lake Victoria, and I’m tempted to read two books at once. That’s a mistake I’ve often committed, but try to avoid.