association-list

I put aside some­thing like thirty five books the other day. I’d recently needed to clean up all of the books at the foot of my bed and on my chair, so I reor­ga­nized and cleared out another shelf for those. As this involved some shuf­fling, I got a closer look at some of the things that have been fes­ter­ing at the bottom of my first to-​​read shelf, and I real­ized that I’m just not going to get to some of them. A few days later I was start­ing on a paper­back and I real­ized that I wasn’t going to finish it, either. It was over­writ­ten and far too long and the dialog was just painful. To make mat­ters worse, it was the start of a series.

So I marked my place, got up, and cleared out half a shelf in my closet. Then I went through all the to-​​read piles, and the piles of things that I’d stalled out on long ago and I started culling. It pains me, because I’m a skin­flint and paid full price for most of them, but once I was done there were still ninety books there. Almost a year of read­ing, if I was to stop buying books tomor­row. Away they went.

The only reason this even bears talk­ing about (although it likely doesn’t) is that I don’t often put books aside very often. When I start some­thing, I gen­er­ally finish it, unless it’s too awful to con­tinue read­ing. Lately, as I’ve spent more time writ­ing and less time read­ing, I’ve been falling fur­ther and fur­ther behind. So it’s time for a new strat­egy. It’s uncom­fort­able for me. I feel that I should give each book a shot, each author a chance, but I just don’t think that its going to work. I real­ize that what I am doing is fairly normal, for the rest of the populace.

So, anyway. To the authors whose gems I will never dis­cover, I’m sorry.