One of my little projects last year was something I modestly called “Twenty Core [Subgenre] Speculative Fiction Works Every True SF Fan Should Have On Their Shelves.” Reading is a huge part of my life. Thanks to my freakish cognitive architecture, I read quickly, and thanks to the fact I am as gregarious as a stylite, I have the time to read prodigiously. Putting together the core lists was an amusing application of my resources and yet in amongst all the lists, readers found Twenty Core Speculative Fiction Works It May Surprise You To Learn I Have Not Yet Read Every True SF Fan Should Have On Their Shelves.
It’s worse than that list may at first appear. Not only have I not read any of the books on the list, despite the fact that I’ve owned copies of a number of the books in question since their first publication, but that list is only the tip of the iceberg—only the first twenty examples that came to mind. I am not engaging in a highly inefficient attempt to better insulate my library. I always intend to read books when I buy them. At the same time, I do have a faint, primordial consciousness that time is finite and that I am limited to about 180,000 words of fiction a day[1] and sufficient rudimentary math skills to work out that if I acquire more than 180,000 words of prose a day, then some of those words won’t get read that day. They might not ever get read. Poor sad, unread words…
There’s purpose beyond mindless acquisition behind my habits. Firstly, I am in a very minor way a professional reviewer. In private life I have been known to duck into steam tunnels or scale walls up to a rooftop to avoid failing yet another real-time Turing Test, but when it comes to work, I try to be as outgoing as Death itself, always eager to make new acquaintances. It seems rude to turn down Advanced Reading Copies when offered, despite the reality that even I can do the math on “N books read & reviewed/week vs. 3N ARCs/week received.” Who am I to doubt a publisher’s wisdom in balancing the potential benefits of a future review versus the possibility that I might not ever get around reading the books in question?
Not every book I receive is an ARC. Each book I purchase means the author gets their little pittance, that tiny mite sufficient to keep them striving despite the fact that riches are unlikely, that crushing poverty and abrupt, unjust obscurity very nearly guaranteed. Even false hope is hope. Even if I temporarily acquire the book from a library, the author benefits in two ways. Firstly, libraries purchase the books they lend out. Secondly, I live in Canada and Canada has a Public Lending Right program, explained in more detail here.[2] Each author whose books are in a Canadian library can look forward to riches of Croesusian magnificence, enough to purchase a can of Pringles or a stylish toque, perhaps.
Then there’s the promise of potential. Every new book on the wall, each epub tucked away in my Kobo gives me a delicious tingle of anticipation. Sure, the math says I probably won’t get around to reading any particular book I acquire. It also says that I might. I will take might any day of the week. Better might than definitely won’t.
And finally there’s the security of knowing that even if worse comes to worst, even if I never buy another book, I have enough unread books, each promising in their individual way, to last me for the rest of my life. The sky may burn, civilization may fall, I might be reduced to stalking and eating my former neighbours, all so very considerately composed of tasty, tasty meat—but I will never, ever lack for reading material. And that makes me smile.
[1] Every once in a while I manage a wonderful state of transcendentally focused consciousness where my reading speed doubles or even triples. I have no idea how to induce that state of mind.
[2] Used books are more problematic, although presumably the author was paid when the book was first purchased new. As well, there are some works where a used copy is the only copy that can be found (I suppose “Why the Hell Are These Books Out of Print” could be a future piece.) There’s always the hope a sufficiently inspirational review will inspire a publisher to bring the book back into print.
In fact, I once demonstrated the remarkable clarity of my unparalleled memory by complaining bitterly that Alexei Panshin’s Rite of Passage was out of print having forgotten that A: there was a brand new edition, B: that the edition in question was published by the company for which I freelanced, and finally C: I was the first reader whose report played a role in inspiring that edition.
Top image: Missmarettaphotography under CC BY-SA 4.0 License
In the words of Wikipedia editor TexasAndroid, prolific book reviewer and perennial Darwin Award nominee James Davis Nicoll is of “questionable notability.” His work has appeared in Publishers Weekly and Romantic Times as well as on his own websites, James Nicoll Reviews and Young People Read Old SFF (where he is assisted by editor Karen Lofstrom and web person Adrienne L. Travis). He is surprisingly flammable.
Yeah, I also have enough books that I should be set for the rest of my life and beyond.
Although I wonder if we need an updating of that Twilight Zone episode — instead of Burgess Meredith stepping on his glasses, he realizes that the only unread books he owns are Robert Adams’ complete Horseclans series and a bunch of August Derleth completions of Lovecraft fragments or something.
*sigh* In 2016 I exercised miraculous restraint and read through my entire TBR pile. (Hold your applause!) But then, in a fit of self-congratulation, I spent all of my Christmas money and gift cards on 45 new books that had been pining away on my many wish lists, thinking “I’ll read one a week, easy peasy.” And then, throughout the year, I kept buying new releases that I really wanted, too, and additional books to series I hadn’t finished yet, and non-SFF books for my book club, and preorders that I just had to preorder because I’ve been striving to support authors’ new stuff instead of perpetually dog paddling in their backlists…and…well… my TBR pile is now TBR piles, and I don’t know what I was thinking.
You were thinking “books are good” and “maybe they will add a fifth week to each month!”, both of which are perfectly reasonable.
This is framed on my library wall: http://wondermark.com/442/
I don’t really understand this. I like to have a couple of unread books available so I have something to read next – right now I have 3 new books on my kindle. And there are the few aspirational books like the complete works of Shakesphere which I’ve bought but I’m probably never going to read. But why buy more than that? Why not let the books stay on your wish list for now?
Because books go out of print. I’ve deferred purchases only to discover the works were no longer available. Also, I sometimes defer reading books if the author is dead and I know there cannot be any more.
Most of my unread purchases are from the used bookstore (often on the clearance rack) or Kindle sales. My philosophy is, if I might read it someday, better to pick it up for $1-2 now than take my chances in the future.
I have a terrible wonderful weakness for Humble Bundles and the like.
@6 and @7:
With ebooks, it is much harder for any major title to truly go “out of print.”
Yeah, I get quietly excited when my unread section in my ereader drops below 400. Then I usually buy a whole bunch more.
I think around 150 of those I’ve read at some point in the past and may do again, another 150 I do plan to read at some point when I’m in the right mood, the rest are just lurking there reminding me of my once good intentions.
@3, “…add a fifth week [of vacation time] to each month!”
FTFY
Oh god yes, this is me. I am sharing James’ pain!
Goodreads says I have 1,394 titles on my own massive Mount Tsundoku right now. And this is even after cutting back hard on the number of new books I acquire, and trying to focus on reading things I already own.
The problem is, I pay too close attention to new release buzz, and people keep writing things that make me go “ooh hey that sounds neat I want to read that”, and I can’t exactly ask the entire publishing industry to cool it for six months so I can catch up. It doesn’t work like that. :D
I cannot express how much I dislike downtime. I am no extremist but work-life balance was something slackers came up with to justify sloth. If I am awake, why not do something productive?
@13, Reading isn’t productive? In my experience, if you give the “powers that be” an extra week of your time they’ll just fill it up with more nonsense.
Call it “time off for more reading” instead?
Not all of us get paid to read.
@9 — More difficult, perhaps, but not impossible.
Apropos:
http://www.incidentalcomics.com/2012/08/stray-books.html
Unread books are my friends. Having them around makes me feel happy.
@17, aka Doomsday prep.
15: I have an unexplained talent for monetizing my hobbies. For example, I have a gig where get paid for standing very still for a surprisingly long time. I basically get paid to cosplay Stone Boy.
Hey, what if we did wind up living forever, whether in our meat bodies or uploaded somewhere? (Uploading to my Kindle would save time) We need to be prepared!
Presumably the authors would live forever too, so the supply end would be taken care of. If computers are good enough, we could update authors into vr designed to maximize productivity, running at 10x speed. There is no downside here.
It turns out you cannot overclock living authors at 10x without some risk of combustion, which I see now is bad. Lesson learned!
Although really it’s just a issue with heat transfer…
You just need to coat the authors with a very thin, even coating of thermal paste and then attach some kind of heatsink.
23: The problem is you have to catch the authors first.
just looked at your “20 core works not read” list.
First, thanks for your fine writing and the photo of the most beautiful room in the world (except there should be more busts of women, and the sunlight is bad for the spines). Second, why are we standing here talking? Go now and read Always Coming Home! I feel bad about only having read it twice.
Well, that’s why old-time wealthy people used to own a “private library”. The purpose is not to buy books you feel like reading, one at a time. The purpose is to be able to enter your private library and think, “ok, what am I going to read today ?”, and wander around your shelves, picking this and that, sometimes stumbling upon something you didn’t even know you had.
Although I’m not in any way “wealthy”, I have a quite huge “book room”. I’ve read about 60-70 % of what’s in it, and I like it that way – sometimes I go months without buying a book, and I never run out of surprises when looking through my shelves. I’d feel miserable if I had read every single book in my library.
@26: Now that I read almost exclusively eBooks this doesn’t happen so much, but in my pre-Kindle days, an important part of my ritual was, after finishing a book, spending 20-30 minutes (or longer) kind of pacing back & forth in front of my shelves and deciding what was going to be next. Unless I was in the midst of a series or author run-through, of course, in which case I’d just grab the next book in the sequence.
I soo feel ya! Even with my meager funds and very small library (converted dinning or front room) I have well enough unread books to grant me a sense of security. And the only thing keeping from buying more weekly is that my money must provide for that pesky family I have. (God they are so needy! Food, clothing, shelter.. its never ending.)
But I’m posting to just say how therapeutic it is to see I don’t have some form of compulsive hoarding, or if I do, at least I’m not alone.
I protect myself from mount tsundoku by developing cognitive dissonance whenever I enter a book store. I could buy the book off the shelf but hardcovers and trade paperbacks are expensive in Canada (hush, Australia) and I probably should get the e-book but it’s kinda gauche to find books in a store and then buy them online. I get so twisted around that I don’t buy anything and when I’m not in a bookstore I don’t get around to browsing for books.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb writes about Umberto Eco and his “antilibrary” in The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable. Eco reportedly had a library of more than 30,000 volumes and believed that it was important to have unread books. “Read books are far less valuable than unread ones. The library should contain as much of what you do not know as your financial means, mortgage rates, and the currently tight real-estate market allows you to put there.” It comforts me to know that I will never run out of new books to read and new ideas to explore.
It’s worse than that.
I can be about to read some anticipated book from the to-be-read pile when my attention is caught by the cover of a much-loved book I’ve already read. Re-reads cut into time available for new-reads.
The only way to make a solid and lasting dent in the pile of new books is to physically get rid of all books I’ve already read to avoid the temptation. But I simply am incapable of doing that…
@22 – I am 70% sure there is an amusing story behind this, but am fearful it will turn out to end with the death or disability of the author?
–Dave, 46% confident I will not bust into flames
ps: note that flames are not James’ entire repertoire by a long shot, even if you include lava and bright bursts of light
I would very much appreciate a ““Why the Hell Are These Books Out of Print” column. And aside from resembling your situation– except that I don’t read nearly as fast– I liked the more giddy prose you brought to this topic.
Late to the party, but yeah, a “Why are these books out of print” article/column/recurring feature would be fantastic. You could probably do a few months’ worth on John M. Ford’s books… :(
Do not buy new books because most of them are printed on paper which could bring joy to your children in the future as a forest. Do not buy ebooks till you have read what you started already. This is it. Too much freedom hurts
At 75 years old with a current library of about 8500 volumes (and growing monthly) – about 70% read. I’ve severely cut back on starting any new series although many tempt me greatly.
@8, oh goodness yes. I have about a half-dozen Humble Bundles I haven’t even started on yet, along with a whole slew of ebooks from Early Bird for which I generally paid less than $2 apiece. Not to mention a (much reduced over the last year or so) SBR of a dozen real books I have to get to yet.
I do tend to gravitate to the real books because I don’t really have a proper ebook reader, just my phone. Which I don’t like a lot, but is handy for reading a chapter or two over lunch. The user interfaces on the ebook readers I’ve tried have generally been… horrible, so I’ve never been tempted to spend my money on one.
This is why pitons were invented in the first place.
Along with the 1200 books on my Kindle, I have 25 or so on my phone, several Storybundles worth of goodies, a flash drive of ebooks my son bought me (yes, Dexter is evil. And I still like him), and a couple of plastic sacks full of paperbacks Just In Case (and KRISTIN LAVRANSDATTER to read when I feel like it). Oh, and a spreadsheet full of books to write. That reminds me, I need to draw a Horrible Map that will later turn into a good one through the offices of an artist friend of mine who needs money.
And then I discover new authors (Courtney Milan and Foz Meadows, I’m looking at you) and others write new stuff (Bujold, Jeminsin, Spencer) and then there’s the occasional reread of my favorite crack Because Reasons. And then…”so and so has finally written something new?” Vast sucking sound as Amazon speeds it on the way to me.
I don’t have to go to Powell’s or cons any more for this, either. Yum!
Welcome to my life
This is my literal immortality plan. I have over 1000 books on my to read list on goodreads. Until I read them all, I clearly cannot die. You’re in good company.
Ebooks are my weakness, and they make building a Mount Tsundoku far too easy. Normally I’d be limited in my book purchases by the amount of space I have to put them in, but since ebooks exist in hammerspace I can buy as much of them as I want and not have to worry about space constraints. It’s gotten to the point that my Mount Tsundoku isn’t so much a mountain as it is an eldritch mansion that’s going to eat me alive at some point. Not that I care, really – well, yes, okay, I do care, kind of, but it’s really hard.
I always knew that I wasn’t alone out there in collecting books. My library in progress has already outgrown the number of shelves I have, but if I don’t buy it what will happen to it? I can’t stand the thought of a homeless book!!
A friend of mine characterized his book-acquisition habits as “saving for his retirement”.
The thing that scares me sometimes is my multiple TBR stacks/queues – the actual TBR bookshelf (now expanded to my night table), the Amazon Kindle queue, the Nook Book queue, and the Comixology queue. I am particularly a sucker for Comixology’s 50% and 60% off sales on various collections.
Do unread ebooks of paper books you read many years ago count? I’ve got lots of those (I’m slowly replacing a lot of paper with electrons) and I often find if I reread them I think ‘what was I thinking to admire this so much?’ Mind you, that often because they date from the late 70s – early 80s (which is when I got started) and my tastes have changed somewhat over the years.
Let’s see…in addition to the tons of sales of box sets and “megapacks” on Amazon, I also find inexpensive or free books via BookBub or Pixel of Ink. Then there’s the wonder of Humble Bundle’s book bundles, which I rarely let go by without a purchase. But I’ve also found a number of online collections of free books, mostly on philosophy, economics, science, or mathematics. A favorite place to pick up tons of free ebooks is of course the Mises Institute’s library. They’ll have links to purchase dead-tree editions, but usually have ebook links, mostly in either EPUB or PDF.
I’ve got huge collections of such in my Google Drive and backed up on USB keys. I got the entire library of the webcomic “Goats” on a USB drive with a bottle opener at the other end, and bought the entire backlists of Brandon Sanderson, and Berke Breathed’s entire “Bloom County” collection. Then there’s the Baen Free Library, where I got a metric skrutload of stuff, and copied the contents of the various CDs they included inside the hardcovers of some of their books to my hard drive.
This is, of course, not counting the various and sundry role-playing games I either purchased or backed on Kickstarter currently sitting in a Google Drive folder, waiting for me to find someone who wants to play them. This includes the dead-tree editions of GURPS Vorkosigan Universe, and Howard Tayler’s “Planet Mercenary”. The latest such was the “Wearing the Cape” RPG by M. G. Harmon, and the “Laundry Files” RPG based on the Charlie Stross series of the same name.
It also doesn’t count my Audible library, the audiobooks I got from Librivox, or the books from Project Gutenberg. Sometimes, I do indeed feel like Burgess Meredith.
@9: “With ebooks, it is much harder for any major title to truly go ‘out of print.’”
That’s what I used to believe, until e-books I’d been putting off buying suddenly became MIA on my wishlist. Not just “The Lesbian and Gay Studies Reader” and Timothy Fitzgerald’s “The Ideology of Religious Studies” but Suzy McKee Charnas’s “The Vampire Tapestry,” Beagle’s “A Fine and Private Place,” and quite a few others. Also a drawback of e-books: if a print book is OOP in the US and I can’t get a used copy, I can order it from another country. Not with e-books. It’s very frustrating to see that an e-book is available on Amazon.uk (e.g., “Knowledge of Angels” by Jill Paton Walsh or “Davy” by Edgar Pangborn) but I can’t order it from the US.
So, e-books don’t eliminate the OOP problem.