That moment of overwhelm in a bookstore
Dec. 2nd, 2004 07:34 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
elfsWell, the Rockbox is psychic again. Bottle Rocket is rockin' instrumental, and in this case percussion. Good stuff.
Along the way of doing the errands, I stopped at Half Price Books and dropped off a paper bag full of mostly geek stuff. It was a little sad to finally let go of my Taligent stuff, but that was ages ago and I didn't need it for nostalgic purposes. They gave me eight bucks.
And as I walked through the bookstore, wondering what I could buy with eight bucks, I came to an overwhelming realization: I could buy anything I wanted, but I didn't want to. I have a backlog, you see: all three of Neal Stephenson's Baroque Cycle, and Ventus and The Psychohistory Crisis, and goddess knows how many thousand other books are in my "to read" list. And I do mean "thousands". How many? I estimate there are, and I'm not exaggerating, at least 3900 books in my "to read" list-- and many of them are on my shelves! Not to mention the hundreds of hours of unwatched anime, and the thousand hours I have of audiobooks, and my Japanese classes...
You get the picture. To get me to read something "new", it has to be damnably compelling. Otherwise, it's just going to the end of a very, very, very long queue.
Along the way of doing the errands, I stopped at Half Price Books and dropped off a paper bag full of mostly geek stuff. It was a little sad to finally let go of my Taligent stuff, but that was ages ago and I didn't need it for nostalgic purposes. They gave me eight bucks.
And as I walked through the bookstore, wondering what I could buy with eight bucks, I came to an overwhelming realization: I could buy anything I wanted, but I didn't want to. I have a backlog, you see: all three of Neal Stephenson's Baroque Cycle, and Ventus and The Psychohistory Crisis, and goddess knows how many thousand other books are in my "to read" list. And I do mean "thousands". How many? I estimate there are, and I'm not exaggerating, at least 3900 books in my "to read" list-- and many of them are on my shelves! Not to mention the hundreds of hours of unwatched anime, and the thousand hours I have of audiobooks, and my Japanese classes...
You get the picture. To get me to read something "new", it has to be damnably compelling. Otherwise, it's just going to the end of a very, very, very long queue.
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Date: 2004-12-03 07:35 am (UTC)I wonder if the library has it...
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Date: 2004-12-03 12:02 pm (UTC)How much is many? 30, 300, 3000?
...
Date: 2004-12-03 05:55 pm (UTC)I wish _I_ had thousands of books lined up to read. I've read all of mine, and there's only a handful out that I haven't bought yet. There's just not as many things coming out these days that I want to read, it seems like. I remember when I was a kid/teenager, we'd go to the bookstore at least once a week, and Mama, Daddy, and I would each get a book, and there'd be enough choices that deciding on that one luxury was actually difficult. Of course, my father quickly hooked me on Sci-Fi, so that he'd actually get _two_ new books he could read, so it was easier for him! But now, I'm lucky to find one good book in a month, and I'm actually scared to try new authors because so many of them have sucked royally recently.
Velvet
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Date: 2004-12-03 05:58 pm (UTC)