More Books Than You Can Shake a Stick At

Most people will look at these pictures of an Amazon warehouse and talk about how big, complicated, and organized it is.

I must have been working in finance/supply management publishing for too long, because what I see is no automation, massive amounts of handwork, and those unfortunately oddly sized objects (known as books) which cause trouble for robots to pick and pack, as they would in a proper warehouse. It's sad but bracing to realize that one is never happy with anything.

(Oh, and if this drives you to think of buying something-or-other from that particular retail behemoth, here is a handy link to allow you to do so.)

Incoming Books: May 12th

It had been far too long since I'd been to the Montclair Book Center, my favorite independent -- probably because it's big, and reasonably close, but those are not bad things -- so I placed a big special order a couple of weeks ago and went to pick up most of it (and a few other things, too -- who can walk into a bookstore and just pick up the books he ordered?). This is what I came out with:

A big stack of Parker novels by "Richard Stark" (a pseudonym for the late Donald E. Westlake, used for this particularly dark series of crime novels and a few other related books), comprising Deadly Edge, The Sour Lemon Score, The Outfit, The Green Eagle Score, The Score, Plunder Squad, The Hunter, Slayground, The Man with the Getaway Face, and The Mourner. (All in the fine new University of Chicago editions.) I have hopes of another reading project, once I complete the series -- once again I curse last year's flood, since it destroyed the nine or ten books I had in the series then, including the eight from the last decade -- which might be in late summer, after and assuming I get rid of the towering stack of things I haven't reviewed yet.

Hide Me Among the Graves, the new Tim Powers novel, which is also a distant sequel to his excellent The Stress of Her Regard.

Caine's Law, the fourth novel in Matthew Woodring Stover's tough, bloody, utterly compelling Caine series, which in a better world would be massive bestsellers. (I bought most of Stover's novels -- his early two-book series, Iron Dawn and Jericho Moon; the first two Caine novels; several of his surprisingly excellent Star Wars novels, including Shatterpoint and Traitor -- for the SFBC, back in my misspent youth, and spent a lot of time and ink hectoring the members to buy those books, without as much result as I hoped.)

An Uncommon Scold, a book of nasty quotes -- I think all from women, but I might be confused -- compiled by Abby Adams.

Hav, an odd travelogue-as-novel, by noted travel writer Jan Morris. I've heard good things about it for at least ten years, and there was a nice new edition with an intro by Ursula K. Le Guin (probably telling me to stand up straighter, eat my beans, and be nice to my grandmother, since it's new).

Changeling, a minor Roger Zelazny novel, since I'm going to have to rebuild my Zelazny shelf eventually, so I might as well start now. This is the original trade paperback with the Esteban Maroto illustrations: that is, the right edition.

Moby-Duck, a nonfictional account of that flotilla of rubber ducks that were swept overboard a container ship a few years back and then ended up in the most unlikely parts of the world. It's an interesting story, and I think I've heard good things about this version of the story (by Donovan Hohn, whose work I don't know).

Pocket Kings, the new novel from Ted "son of Joseph" Heller -- because I really liked his first novel, Slab Rat, quite a while ago; and even managed to enjoy and have fond memories of his second book, Funnymen, which I read almost entirely in Roosevelt Hospital, waiting to hear if I'd had a heart attack; and because it's been nearly a decade since that second novel. This one's about poker, I hear.

Jerusalem, the latest of Guy Delisle's graphic novel memoirs of a year he spent working in an interesting city somewhere in the world (after Pyongyang, Shenzhen, and Burma Chronicles) -- and, by the way, it's amazing how jealous I am that someone has that as his "job."

And, last, the two Library of America volumes of Mark Twain's Collected Tales, Sketches, Speeches, & Essays -- one covering 1852-1890, and the other 1891-1910. I had copies of both (flood, again), and had very happy memories of reading them both, interspersed with the usual work reading, in the late summer/early fall of 1993 or 1994.

Montclair, unfortunately, did not have one book I was really hoping for -- William Carlos Williams's Paterson, a book-length poem that's one of the best ever written, and criminally neglected. I want to read it again, and my copy...yes, yes, the flood again. So I'll have to find that elsewhere, or break down and actually order it. But bookstores in this area should be required to carry that book, honestly.

Book Habits: A Meme

Got this from my doppelganger (another blogger/reviewer/toiler in obscure corners of publishing/resident of New Jersey) Rob B:

What is your favorite drink while reading?

I mostly read while commuting these days, so I'm not drinking at the same time. I most usually have water otherwise.

Do you tend to mark your books as you read, or does the idea of writing in books horrify you?

It doesn't horrify me the way it did when I was young and innocent: several years of marking up books for production purposes (and knowing that two old books must die for a new edition to be born) cured me of that. But I tend just to put little pencil marks in for passages I want to quote; I'm not a margin-scribbler.

How do you keep your place while reading a book? Bookmark? Dog-ears? Laying the book flat open?

Bookmarks. Sometimes I'll dog-ear pages to mark a quote, but that's about it.

Fiction, nonfiction, or both?

Both, more or less alternating, these days. (Though with a lot of comics/graphic novels/manga as well, and those are nearly all fiction.)

Are you a person who tends to read to the end of a chapter, or can you stop anywhere?

I read while commuting, so I often have to stop reading because I'm where I need to be. I do try to stop at a natural break, but it doesn't always happen.

Are you the type of person to throw a book across the room or on the floor if the author irritates you?

Authors irritate me all day long; I work in publishing. I try not to hold that against their books. When books annoy me, they may be cast aside lightly, but I generally don't hurl any with great force.

If you come across an unfamiliar word, do you stop and look it up right away?

No. I usually can't, for one thing.

What are you currently reading?

I need to do a bookmark inventory -- since I've got them in at least two dozen books scattered across the house -- but the main thing I'm reading now is Michael Lewis's The Big Short.

What is the last book you bought?

I believe the last thing I picked up to add to my pile on my last trip to a store selling book-shaped objects was Grendel: God and the Devil by Matt Wagner, John K. Snyder III, Jay Geldhoff, and Bernie Mireault. The last just-words book that I picked up similarly was The Sad Tale of the Brothers Grossbart by Jesse Bullington.

Are you the type of person that reads one book at a time, or can you read more than one?

I usually only have one main (narrative) book going at once these days, but I've often read several books in tandem, particularly back in my book-club days. And, of course, there's the bathroom book, the a-few-pages-before-bed book, and so on....

Do you have a favorite time/place to read?

I do most of my reading on the train to and from work. My favorite time and place to read was late at night, in the 24-hour room of Vassar's library, in the late '80s, while getting paid as a Campus Patroller. Sadly, that's no longer possible now.

Do you prefer series books or stand alones?

I don't prefer genre fiction that much to make this a reasonable question to begin with. I prefer books with something to say and the style to say it well. I find that later books in series often have neither of those, and we keep reading them out of inertia, which is no good for anyone.

Is there a specific book or author you find yourself recommending over and over?

It depends on the context -- and I don't give out a lot of recommendations to begin with -- but I've often mentioned Lawrence Block, Gene Wolfe, P.G. Wodehouse, Donald E. Westlake, and Roger Zelazny, in various contexts.

How do you organize your books? (by genre, title, author’s last name, etc.)

Oh, it's much more complicated than that. First, there's the great read-unread divide. Then there are the stacks of unread review books, versus the shelves of unread books I bought. The read shelves are divided into several categories: comics, oversized, classics, hardcovers, trade paperbacks, and mass markets (hiding behind the classics). And there are probably other quirks (like the from-the-library pile) that I'm ignoring or skimming over.

Bad Lessons

Tonight, once again, as I dug through a giant pile of old bound galleys that I keep intending to sell or give away or otherwise dispose of, I felt that life was teaching me the wrong lesson.

Because I found my copy of The Best American Comics: 2008, and, if I had been more organized or quicker to cull, I wouldn't have.

The good news is that I can keep working on my review of the 2009 book; the bad news is that I have ever more incentive never to get rid of a single book.

Millions of Secondhand Books -- Free for the Taking!

Good news: there's a warehouse full of books, and the owners want people to come in and take away everything they can carry.

Bad news (for me, at least): it's in Bristol.

Oh, well -- I suppose I have too many unread books already...

BBC Book List Meme

This came to me from Facebook via Aislinge Kellogg, but I've modified it slightly to use it in a format that allows HTML. (The original had a lot of "add an X to the end of this category, and include a hash to mean thus-and-such," which is too difficult to read.) I expect I'll make comments along the way; I usually do.

Apparently the BBC reckons most people will have only read 6 of the 100 books here.
Instructions:
1) Bold those you have read most or all of.
2) Italicize those you've read only pieces of
3) Add a '#' to those you were supposed to have read in school, but didn't. (I don't have any of these; I didn't waste my education that way.)
4) Underline the ones you LOVE.
5) Set small those you plan on reading.
6) Set large those you did not read, but saw the movie!
7) Strikethrough those you really didn't like.
8) Tally your total at the bottom.

• 1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
• 2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien
• 3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte (three times! all for classes)
  
• 4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling
• 5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
• 6 The Bible (who hasn't?)
  
• 7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
• 8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell (at least twice)
  
• 9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman (read the first book so far)
  
• 10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens
• 11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott
• 12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
• 13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller (at least twice)
  
• 14 Complete Works of Shakespeare
• 15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
• 16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien
• 17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks
• 18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger
• 19 The Time Traveller’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
• 20 Middlemarch - George Eliot
• 21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell
• 22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald
• 23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens
• 24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
• 25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams
• 26 Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
• 27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
• 28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
• 29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll
• 30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame
• 31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
• 32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
• 33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis
• 34 Emma - Jane Austen
• 35 Persuasion - Jane Austen
• 36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis (this, I see, is another one of those badly compiled lists, including the same works twice)
  
• 37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
• 38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres
• 39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden
• 40 Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne
• 41 Animal Farm - George Orwell (several times)
  
• 42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown
• 43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
• 44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney - John Irving
• 45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
• 46 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery
• 47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
• 48 The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood
• 49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding
• 50 Atonement - Ian McEwan
• 51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel (gave up in boredom about 75 pages in)
  
• 52 Dune - Frank Herbert
• 53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
• 54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen
• 55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
• 56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
• 57 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens (Dickens is a wonderful writer, but this is a tedious, turgid mess. His short books are generally his worst.)
  
• 58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
• 59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon
• 60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
• 61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck
• 62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
• 63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt
• 64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold
• 65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas
• 66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac (I think so, but it was back in high school, and I don't remember it at all.)
  
• 67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
• 68 Bridget Jones’s Diary - Helen Fielding
• 69 Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie
• 70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville
• 71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens
• 72 Dracula - Bram Stoker
• 73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett
• 74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson
• 75 Ulysses - James Joyce
• 76 The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath
• 77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
• 78 Germinal - Emile Zola
• 79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray
• 80 Possession - AS Byatt
• 81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens
• 82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
• 83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker
• 84 The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
• 85 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
• 86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
• 87 Charlotte’s Web - EB White
• 88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom
• 89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
• 90 The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton
• 91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
• 92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery
• 93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
• 94 Watership Down - Richard Adams
• 95 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
• 96 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute
• 97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas
• 98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare
• 99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl
• 100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo (well, the Broadway show, but close enough)

Total Read Completely: 45
Total Read Partially: 3
Total Supposed to Read, but Didn't: 0
Total Loved: 12
Total Want to Read: 10 (these are all things I own copies of, which, at this point, is my definition of "want to read")
Total Just-the-Movie: 6
Total Read But Hated: 2

So I've seen as many movies as the BBC thinks I've read books, and read nearly eight times as much as they expect. I may perhaps be a bit older than they expect, though, and I'm definitely more interested in books than the norm.

The Rising Tide

A couple of weeks ago, Larry (of OF Blog of the Fallen) counted up that he'd gotten 232 new books in the first 231 days of the year, which inspired me to do a similar count myself.

But sometimes inspiration has to wait a while for free time to catch up.

Tonight I finally had the time and the inclination to run through my "Incoming Books" and "Reviewing the Mail" posts for the year so far, and here are the rough totals for the first 246 days of the year:

Books for review: 275
Books purchased for myself: at least 63 (I may have missed some)
Books from the library: approximately 30

Round that all off and it's around 370-380 books so far this year, and it's only September. Luckily, I spent sixteen years working in an office where I'd routinely see a dozen or more new books in a day, so this all still looks like a trickle.

(And, as I always say when I count up impressive numbers of books, half or more of those are comics, which means they read much faster than prose.)

What the Left Hand Knows

Recently I realized that my to-be-read shelves are so large and capacious that I have entire shelves of things, mostly buried in back and behind, that I've completely forgotten about.

For example: a few weeks ago I was digging through the shelves, trying to pick books for the trip to Anaheim. (This is always complicated, particularly when I have a long plane flight, since some conferences mean a lot of time for reading -- especially if the hall gets dead during sessions, but I'm stuck, alone, in the booth -- and some don't.) I discovered, among other things that were surprises to me, that I had copies of the first "Richard Aleas" novel, Little Girl Lost, and bound galleys of two of the battling Douglas Adams biographies of about five years ago.

I'm so far behind at this point that I could probably stop buying books immediately, read only from my unread stacks, live to a hundred, and still not finish everything. And yet I grabbed six books for myself at the library just this afternoon, including two more volumes of Naruto and new nonfiction by Haruki Murakami and Larry McMurtry.

I'm not sure if that's optimism or insanity...

Not That I'm Proud of This...

I've mentioned a couple of times that I was just on a five-day business trip to San Francisco. And I've blogged before about the agony of picking the right book(s) for a trip -- what if I get stuck on a five-hour flight with a book I don't want to keep reading?

So I thought I should come clean about my book-packing for this trip. It was high, even for me, since I threw in the things I wanted to cover for ComicMix this week, and I was also doing the Hard Case Crime thing as well.

But I packed fourteen books for five days away -- seven Hard Case and seven comics.

Although I should point out that I read eleven of those during those five days, and one more today, after I got back. So it looks like I packed only slightly too many books -- and I can live with that.

The Dreaded To-Be-Read "Pile"

Patrick, over at Pat's Fantasy Hotlist, has dared us all to reveal the contents of our to-be-read piles. While I don't have time enough to type in all of the titles, I can give you an overview, since -- inspired by him -- I've just measured my shelves.

My unread shelves total about eighty-seven and a half feet (a thousand and fifty inches). The books range in size from a quarter inch to two inches, so let's call it about three books per two inches for a rough average -- that gives me about fifteen hundred unread books. In recent years, I'm averaging reading about three hundred twenty books a year, of which roughly 62 percent (or one hundred ninety-eight books) were for myself (and not for work). At that rate, if I don't add any more books to the stack, I can finish up everything I already have in only about seven and a half years.)

Some of the things I have to read, choosing one book semi-randomly from each distinct area or pile, are:

• The Rainbow Fairy Book by Andrew Lang, illustrated by Michael Hague
• A History of Britain (three volumes) by Simon Schama
• The Plot by Will Eisner
• Ulysses by James Joyce
• He Knew He Was Right by Anthony Trollope
• American Poetry (Library of America, probably edited by someone, in four very large volumes)
• The Letters of Evelyn Waugh edited by Mark Amory
• Collected Poems by Philip Larkin
• The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana by Umberto Eco
• The Fortress of Solitude by Jonathan Lethem
• Yaleen by Ian Watson
• White Time by Margo Lanagan

All of those books share two things in common: 1) I can read their titles, more or less, from where I'm sitting now, and 2) I'm not likely to get to any of them this year.

Unread Books Meme

Niall Harrison at Torque Control was doing this one last week, and I can't avoid book-related memes, so...

Ten Books I Own and Want to Read But Haven't Gotten To Yet
I have so many more than ten books I haven't read, so I'll try to pick ones that I've had a ridiculously long time, or otherwise have a vaguely interesting story.

1. Seven Pillars of Wisdom by T.E. Lawrence -- I think I got this in college; I had it so long in the back row of a doubled-shelved bookcase that the top two inches of its spine are sun-faded. For a while I was trying to decide whether to read this or Jeremy Wilson's biography Lawrence of Arabia first, but I never read either.
2. A Christmas Carol and Other Haunting Tales by Charles Dickens -- I've thought about reading this in December for the past five years or so, and haven't done it yet.
3. Bitterroot by James Lee Burke -- the first of four Burkes stacked up on my mystery shelf (along with three Sara Paretskys, the US and UK versions of the same giant Lawrence Block collection, more Loren D. Estleman books than I can shake a stick at, and sundry other things).
4. The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay by Michael Chabon -- I own it in hardcover, and it's been gathering dust for at least five years.
5. The Civil War: A Narrative by Shelby Foote -- three big fat volumes, which I got when I joined Book-of-the-Month Club in about 1989. I don't think I've so much as cracked them open.
6. An Instance of the Fingerpost by Iain Pears -- the book everybody was reading four or five years ago. I got it then...
7. Patriots and Liberators by Simon Schama -- a decade ago, I was tearing through Schama's books; I think when I got this one it was the only book of his I hadn't read yet. Since then I've piled up three volumes of A History of Britain, Rembrandt's Eye, and probably one or two more I'm forgetting.
8. The Year's Best Science Fiction, Twentieth Annual Collection edited by Gardner Dozois -- I've read every other annual book in this series since the 8th collection, but I bought this one before reading it four years ago, and since learned that, in bookclubs, if you buy it before you read it, you'll never have time to go back and read it, since there are always books to buy you haven't read yet.
9. Silverlock by John Myers Myers -- I've upgraded my copy once (meaning I've bought it twice), but never read it.
10. Strange Travelers by Gene Wolfe -- and I'm now three story collections behind on Wolfe. If I manage to read Soldier of Sidon this fall I'll still be caught up on his novels, though.

My Unread "Bookshelf," Part Three

And this is the last bit -- my poetry shelf. I used to dip into this quite a bit, but I haven't touched it much lately. Bookending it to the right are poetry anthologies, and bookending it to the right is the giant stack of comics, art books, and other oversized junk that I get to in between "real" books. It was about a foot taller before Christmas, which was the main reason I went on the book-a-day regimen; I wanted to keep it from falling and crushing me like a bug.

You can also see two other deep storage piles in the edges of this photo: one is on the other end of the desk, and the other is at the extreme top left of the photo, sitting on a stool. Both of those are made up of various oversized things that I could never carry to work (and in some cases, wouldn't want to, because they're quotation books). Both piles have been essentially static for at least two years.

So: those are the books I wish I'd read already. How about the rest of you?

My Unread "Bookshelf," Part Two

This is space I colonized for unread books two or three years ago, when I definitively overflowed the first bookcase. The front of these two bookcases have my unread classics, roughly organized by format, publisher and (in some cases) author. Behind these are books I've actually read, mostly classics.

I have to admit I barely touch this bookcase these days (except to put new things into it), but I keep hoping that will change "soon."

My Unread "Bookshelf," Part One

I haven't quite figured out how to post more than one picture at a time, so this will have to go up in three tries. However, that will make each piece smaller, which might help.

This is something else I was thinking about doing for a while, partly to see if it turns into a meme (along the lines of Tobias Buckell's "Authors Workspaces") and partly as practice, since I think I'll be trying to do some photo-blogging from conventions once I actually start the official SFBC blog.

Anyway, this is the first of three photos of my unread books, to memorialize how large the pile was at the point just as I switched over from reading things from the pile to reading the massive flow of WFA materials. This pile will only grow larger over the next six to nine months.

This photo shows my main unread bookcase. Four interior shelves, all double-shelved, with big piles on top. If you squint, you can probably tell that the bottom half is SF/Fantasy, the top half is mainstream fiction and non-fiction, and on top are mysteries (and, behind them, mass-market paperbacks). The pile to the left on top (which continues on the small table off to the side) is the most recent books that came in, which haven't been integrated into the stacks yet. Those are the ones I had hopes of reading quickly.

And off to the right, you can see the growing piles of WFA books, which are what I'll be reading mostly for the foreseeable future. No whining from me; so far it's really good stuff, and I'm excited about having an excuse to dive into so much fantasy for so long.