Is Book Lust a Sin?

    

     My bookshelves have long since reached the point where a book has to be somewhere removed from the shelves before I can add any recent acquisition. And even then, it’s still a matter of shifting books around until a spot opens up in the appropriate section of my shelving. I’ve even tried the periodic book-purge in which I’ve found new homes for ten or twenty books at a time, but that method almost always immediately sends me out book-shopping again until all that wonderful free space is filled. 

     So, in practical terms, the rule around here is “one book in, one book out.” And that’s gotten harder for me to do because the individual  choices are getting to be more and more difficult to make now. It's beginning to cut too close to the bone. Rather ridiculously, my answer - despite my aversion to buying e-books from Amazon - has been to buy e-books from those vendors that allow me to download backup copies to my computer, vendors like Kobo and a few publishers that sell directly to readers. (More on this later if anyone is interested.)

     Shelf space problem solved. Whole new problem created. 

     Since the Year of the Plague (2020), I’ve bought more e-books every year than I can possibly ever read. As of this moment, there are 1,659 e-books on my Kobo reader, with a paltry 335 of those actually having been read. A handful of others have been abandoned after failed efforts on my part to find them readable, but that still leaves something over 1,300 unread books on the reader. 

     And I keep on buying them, and buying them, and buying them. 

     They are not all new books; in fact, well over half of them are back catalog choices that I’ve gotten at really good prices. (Is this starting to sound more like an addiction now and not just a harmless hobby?) I see that I purchased over 30 books in January, and already this month, another 10. The best that I can say about them, is that they are a fairly diverse bunch of books - and that I’ll never, ever, run out of things to read. 2026 purchases include:

• Eight books from Peter Robinson’s Inspector Banks series
• The new Michael J. Fox memoir, Future Boy
• Maggie O’Farrell’s Hamnet, historical fiction about the death of Shakespeare’s eleven-year-old son
• The Impossible Fortune, Richard Osman’s fifth book in his Thursday Murder Club series
• Michael Connelly’s eighth Lincoln Lawyer book, The Proving Ground
• Elizabeth George’s latest Inspector Lynley book, A Slowly Dying Cause
• The Land of Sweet Forever, a collection of Harper Lee short stories and magazine pieces
• Nobody’s Girl, Virginia Roberts Giuffre memoir of being sexually exploited by Jeffrey Epstein, Ghislaine Maxwell, and Prince Andrew, among others
• Clown Town, Mick Herron’s latest Slow Horses book, along with six earlier pre-Slow Horses books from his back catalog
• Eleven books from Martin Cruz Smith’s back catalog

     And of the thirty-three purchased so far this year, a whopping five of them have been read.

     That’s pretty typical of what I’ve been buying now that I’m tending to binge-read certain authors that catch my eye. If I particularly enjoy a book and rate it a rare five-stars, I find myself wanting to know instantly what else that author has published. And then I want to read them all. But 1,659 e-book purchases in a little over five years is crazy. 

     Book lust has to be a sin…right?

     

     

Saving Fish from Drowning by Amy Tan

 

What you need to know about this one:

• Published in 2006
• One of Tan’s lesser known novels
• Less detail about Chinese history and culture than in author’s more popular books
• Focuses on 11 American tourists who disappear into the Myanmar jungle on Christmas morning
• A satirical look at American tourists (these are all from San Francisco) who naively place themselves in grave danger while expecting their good intentions and American citizenship to keep them safe from harm
• Comic at times, deadly serious at others, even when one sixteen-year-old boy reluctantly becomes a god for the tribe that kidnaps the group
• Not what most expected from Amy Tam after The Joy Luck Club, The Kitchen God’s Wife or The Bonesetter’s Daughter

I imagine that this was quite a change-of-pace novel for Tan when she published it. I like it (not love it) because of the interesting characters she develops so well over the course of this 472-page story. If you like literary fiction, you are probably going to enjoy Saving Fish from Drowning.

Slow Reading, Re-Reading Old Favorities, and Just Turning Pages

 I must be feeling better. 

I’ve only noticed that in the last few days. Some of my old energy has returned and - even though my health situation is still a precarious one - I opened up my own blog today for the first time in months. Just reading some of the old posts and comments brought back so many great memories, that I wanted to say hello to anyone out there who might still be reading book blogs.

I’m sad to see that so many of my old favorites seem to have disappeared or drastically cut back on blogging for their own reasons. That makes me realize just how long some of us have been doing this and how many good friends have come (and sadly) gone over the last twenty years or so.

So this is just a HELLO! to the book community, or what’s left of it. I’m not sure how long I will continue to feel so much better than I have in months, but I just wanted to let everyone know that I’m still here and reading. 

My reading has changed over the last year or so in that I’m doing very little reviewing and have decided to read strictly for my own personal pleasure. I’m doing more re-reading than ever, more slow reading, more nonfiction, and just generally enjoying my reading more than I have in a very long time.

I’ll stop here because I have a feeling this post is akin to putting a note in a bottle and tossing it into the sea. It may just sink to the bottom of the ocean - or with a little bit of luck, it will find it's way into the hands of a few readers and old friends.

So here goes...