It’s one of the weird things for me about wanting to be a librarian. I have such a hard time finding books that I really like to read. Check my Goodreads, I’ve been through a bunch of books. It’s so odd though, the older I get, and especially after the Ooligan experience, I’m just a hell of a lot more picky about what I read.
If I open a book and find too many missed spelling mistakes or grammar slips, I’m out. Back it goes onto the shelf. Or back to Powells. The worst ones are the books that suck me in with their decent enough prose and appearance of quality editing. Then in the last few chapters spring the totally unbelievable ending on me. Fuck those writers and their editors. Rule #1 may be to entertain your audience, but Rule #2 has to be don’t cheat the audience.
I’m a huge fan of science fiction. And the older I get, the more restrictive I get in my SF preferences. I started reading everything when I discovered the rocket ships and aliens genre. I’m down to the golden age masters at this point. That isn’t a bad thing, really. But I have this nasty thing where I am quite reluctant to re-read something. There are so many wonderful books out there to sit down with, so going over a book I’ve already read seems like a bit of intellectual sacrilege. And to top it off, all the golden age SF masters seem to be slightly dead, so their production of new stuff has slowed somewhat in the last few decades.
I did a count of the books on my shelves last night: 318 unique volumes, not counting my daughter’s books, or my graphic novels. I have another 100+ books in boxes in the garage. That’s what over 100 pounds of books, a score or more of boxes, and a big chunk of time needed to move them from place to place. It’s sad and wonderful when I realize that all those books could easily fit on 1-2 DVDs. Even if scanned to PDFs with full pictures, OCRed, the works. Still somewhere south of 8 gigs of data. That’s what, a few ounces at best. Shit, a Kindle could hold my collection. If Amazon sold the random assortment of titles I have on my shelves.
