Unread books – an attempt to prioritise

What with the older car having died, and Anne needing the newer one to ferry B back and forth to her new place in Tienen, it looks like I will be reading even more books in the future as I will have about an hour and a half on the train every day. We were planning for this to happen after I start at the new job in January anyway, so it’s just come a bit sooner than expected.

Despite my best intentions, my list of unread books now stands at 153, actually up from 146 the last time I counted, despite my efforts to be disciplined. Of those 153, 52 were acquired this year (plus, er, about 165 that I have already read); in other words, of the 130-odd I mentioned at the end of last year, I have read about a quarter. Thanks to LibraryThing I can list certain priorities as follows:

Most recently acquired:

Robert A. Heinlein, Variable Star (for review)
Elizabeth Pond, Endgame in the Balkans (for review)
Charles Stross, The Atrocity Archives

Added earliest to my catalogue:

Anne Lamott, Crooked little heart
Dee Brown, Bury my heart at Wounded Knee
Theodore Zeldin, An intimate history of humanity
Marina Warner, Joan of Arc
Christopher Donaldson, The great English pilgrimage

Most popular among LibraryThing users:

Thomas Pynchon, The Crying of Lot 49
Sun Tzu, The Art of War
Terry Pratchett, Pyramids
Patrick Suskind, Perfume: The Story of a Murderer
Bill Bryson, Notes From a Small Island

Most often tagged “unread” by LibraryThing users:

Thomas Pynchon, The Crying of Lot 49
George Elliot, The Mill on the Floss,
J.R.R. Tolkien, Unfinished Tales
Dee Brown, Bury my heart at Wounded Knee
Joseph Conrad, Lord Jim

With less than a month to go in the year, my reading resolutions are in mixed form. But I still have a chance of meeting some of my targets by the end of the year by:

  • Finishing Don Quixote.
  • Finishing Dhalgren, reading Grey Lensman, and buying and reading one other out of A Princess of Mars, Tau Zero, Again, Dangerous Visions, The Female Man, Last and First Men, and Deathbird.
  • Reading seven other books that I acquired before the end of 2005.

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