… yeah, it’s gonna take two pictures again. Sigh. I’ve got two weeks off coming, I can tighten this up. I swear.
One book in one of those pictures was bought out of spite. See if you can guess which one! Your hint is that it’s new this month, but unfortunately there are a lot of those.
I’m genuinely not sure how I pulled that off, given that this isn’t a summer month– Storygraph has me at just barely under 7,000 pages for October, which looks ridiculous until you realize June was 11,500.
At any rate, The Eye of the Bedlam Bride is Book of the Month, followed very closely by Mark Twain. Hastings’ Vietnam book is excellent as well but I’m only about halfway through it.
I worry that what you heard was “I have a lot of books.”
I have all the books. Do you understand?
And, as you no doubt can tell, I have lots of other shit as well. And three other people live in this house! They have stuff too, even though nearly every single object you can see in these pictures is mine. Except the Pokéballs. Those are the boy’s.
This is the second house in a row where we have eventually decided to convert what was supposed to be the dining room into a library. I am absolutely out of places to put shit and I have been reading at a 175-books-a-year clip for the last couple of years. I still have some space on top of bookshelves, especially if I get rid of some of the statues and Legos (and the statues, honestly, may be on their way out soon) but one way or another I’m no more than two years away from needing to pile shit on the floors if something doesn’t change.
So yesterday, fearing an actual intervention, I ordered this:
along with a $12-a-month subscription to Kindle Unlimited. I’m thinking about instituting a rule that any book by a new author gets bought on digital first. Does that mean I won’t get those books in physical form? Not necessarily; as you can tell, I’m not just a reading enthusiast, I’m a book collector, and those two hobbies feed into each other in obvious and terrible ways. There will be books by new authors that I feel the need to own physically. But in most years at least 30% of my books are by authors new to me– this year, right now, it’s actually just over half. Surely this will end up saving me money as well as essential shelf space, right? That Dinniman book on the cover of the Kindle there is in one of those pictures in hardcover– on the white bookshelves, a couple shelves below the Wheel of Time books– but it was free on KU so I downloaded it anyway, to see if I lose my mind trying to read a thousand-page book on an e-reader. We’ll see.
We can’t move. We got our mortgage rate on this house before the economy exploded. We’ll never see this rate again. I’ve got to do something.
Book of the Month is … somehow, The Butcher’s Masquerade, by Matt Dinniman, with a special “yes, I’m serious, and no, I can’t explain it” runner-up award for You Weren’t Meant to be Human, by Andrew Joseph White.
“That’s not that bad,” you might be thinking. “Didn’t you say yesterday that your unread shelf was going to be unprecedented and absolutely ridiculous?”
Yes, I said that. Look closer.
“I mean, it’s interesting that those are all hardbacks. And it’s weird that they’re all the same size. But a bunch of them are new … wait.”
Depressing, I know, but remember I stared an 800-page history of London on July 31 and school started this month, so it’s not quite as depressing as it looks.
Book of the Month is Shroud, which I guess I should have reviewed.
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