read every book I own

Anybody’s who’s been reading some of my comments on here knows that I have over 100 books sitting on my to-read shelf, with more and more books being added all the time. I’m tired of being a slave to my book shelf. But, rather than go on a reading tear, I’m going to start getting read of books I don’t really care to read. Life is short, and you only have time to read so many books. There are so many authors I want to read who wrote so avidly (e.g., Stephen King, Agatha Christie, Isaac Asimov) that I don’t have time to read everything that I might possibly want to read. I’m just about through Michael Crichton’s catalog, and that’s taken me quite some time. So I think I’m going to start borrowing from the library rather than keep accumulating books.

Freedom!

Since my last post, I have acquired

• Arabian Nights
• F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Tender Is the Night
• Alan Moore’s graphic novel (or big comic book) Batman: The Killing Joke
• Alan Moore’s more famous graphic novel Watchmen
• E.A. Burtt’s The Metaphysical Foundations of Modern Science
• Will Durant’s The Story of Philosophy
• Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw
• Dashiell Hammett’s Red Harvest

I’ve also read four books, but only one was sitting on my to-read shelf: Watchmen. Even now, I’m reading another book I don’t own (Stephenie Meyer’s Eclipse) that I don’t own. Ah well, at least I’m finally almost done with Les Miserables and I’ll be able to check it off soon.

I just finished F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby. A really good book that I recommend everybody read. I’m still wading through Les Miserables and I’m taking up Twilight on the side. I know, I know. I should be ashamed of myself. But I figure pop culture phenomena are worth reading so that one day my kids might ask me and I can say “Yes, I read that.” But I don’t own Twilight. A friend of ours lent it to The Missus, but she’s reading something else. So I slipped it off her bedside table and started it this morning.

Finished Michael Crichton’s State of Fear, but I also got Alan Moore’s Watchmen

So I’m staying put at 112. Some day I’ll get back under 100. And maybe one day I’ll finish them all.

Just finished Michael Crichton’s Prey. I really liked it (4/5). This one is more in the vein of Sphere and The Great Train Robbery: just plain fun.

Since my last entry, I’ve read two books: Agatha Christie’s The Mysterious Affair at Styles and Isaac Asimov’s Foundation. Now I’m working slowly through Les Miserables and Ray Bradbury’s The October Country. More on those later I suppose. It’s time to sleep!

Finishing Keith Ablow’s Murder Suicide brings my total left down to 115. The premise was pretty interesting, but the follow-through and execution were somewhat lacking. He introduces us to a dozen suspects, then picks one (seemingly at random), and tries to explain it like it was obvious the whole time. But in fact, I started the book out thinking it was a suicide. This was clearly not his best effort, but Ablow’s good enough that his worst is better than a lot of writers’ best.

Next up: Matthew Pearl’s The Poe Shadow.

I know, I know. If you finish one book, your total ought to go down. But they opened a new, huge Goodwill here, and who can resist just one $1 book? It was Battlefield Earth. I’ve read some bad reviews of it, so I may take it off my list and sell it somewhere. Anybody have any thoughts on that?

The other book, The Canterbury Tales, I found while packing.

Anyway, Psycho the book isn’t nearly as scary as the movie, especially if you’ve seen the movie, but he writes with some interesting atmosphere and characterization. Bloch also does what I think is fascinating: when reading the dialog, you can hear the character’s voices pretty clearly, even though he writes in standard English. Still the cheesy ending drops it from 4/5 to 3/5.

I just finished Michael Crichton’s Lost World. But more importantly, I sold off a bunch of books to Halfprice Books to cut down my bookshelf to just 115 books. I’m back on my way to my career low, which was somewhere around 89 books.

The last time I posted, I had 129 to go. I just finished a book today (The Complete Sherlock Holmes, Volume I), and somehow I’m up to 131 to go . . .