OK, this is absurd. I currently have 146 books on my unread list on LibraryThing. That is in fact an increase of 13 over the course of 2006. (Though I am comforted to see one person on my f-list with three times as many.)
I have the following half-starts and obligations:
- Am halfway through Ron Chernow’s biography of Alexander Hamilton – liking it very much, but it is looong.
- Am reading A. Merritt’s The Moon Poll on my Palm T|X when waiting around for meetings to happen, stuck in traffic, etc.
- Started Delany’s Dhalgren back in January, put it aside half-way through, need to decide if I am actually going to finish or not
- Have committed to
to review Živković’s Impossible Stories, which is massive - Will as ever read all Hugo nominees to write up for website – not doing badly so far, got through three novels, two novellas, three novelettes and all short stories
- Have been promised book about Greek/Turkish relations for review here also (a cut-down version of an earlier review from this blog will appear shortly in Survival)
- Have ordered two more books about Cyprus for work purposes
- Am almost two years overdue with certain reviews for Infinity Plus.
In this post I set myself certain reading targets for 2006. Since then I have at least:
- finished Little Women, but not even bought The Brothers Karamazov, Catcher in the Rye, In Search of Lost Time, Mrs Dalloway, Things Fall Apart or The Tin Drum
- I have read A Clockwork Orange, The Space Merchants, and started Dhalgren, so to meet my target for 2006 I need only finish it and read two of A Princess of Mars, Tau Zero, Grey Lensman, Again, Dangerous Visions, The Female Man, Last and First Men and/or Deathbird
- no more “great comics” since New Year.
- The Einstein Intersection. Six (or maybe seven, depending what happens next month) more Nebula winners left, I can probably manange three of them.
- precisely eight out of the 133 books I had listed as “unread” three months ago. The other 25 books I have read so far this year were all obtained since 1 January. Since the unread list has had a net increase of 13 since then, I am at least reading over 45% of the books I acquire.
OK, well, I shall try and work through the unread list a bit more thoroughly. I think I shall try starting from both ends of the popularity scale: the most popular books on Library Thing that I haven’t so far read are The Lovely Bones by Alice Sebold, The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini and Persuasion by Jane Austen, and my most recently acquired books that nobody else on LT owns are William Heinemann by Frederic Whyte, The Mark of Ran by Paul Kearney, and Irish Tales of Terror, ed. Jim McGarry. Maybe I can read those, along with the other aspirations mentioned above, in the next few months.
I think you gave up caring a while ago, once you realised you had blundered.