I was planning on writing some thoughts about my experience as a white, straight, married man in contemporary culture, but that feels really hard so I'm going to write about books instead. Flashman and the Dragon has been slain. The first two thirds of this one was entertaining (as all Flashman books are), but it was also a touch dry with lots of dialogue dedicated to putting all the players in their place and detailing the actions of different armies. The last third was the opposite of that. The domino rally that Macdonald spent all that time setting up fell together beautifully. (Come to think of it, Flashman has lots to say about masculinity.) I have the next Flashman book on my shelf, where it will stay for the next few weeks at least. Flashy is best consumed in moderation. The books are also very reasonable in length (about 300 pages) and highly readable so they are good palate cleansers between weightier (either in sheer heft or density) titles.
With my third book of the year complete (and my unread pile back down to 157 books), I've moved onto the third and final book of the Mistborn trilogy. These have not been my favorite books. I'm not sure I would have even read books 2 and 3 after reading book 1 if I had not bought the entire trilogy as a boxed set. Well, I have this minor goal to read all of Sanderson's books so I can maybe start to see his Cosmere thing come into play as he continues to churn out books at a crazy rate so I probably would have read them eventually. Regardless, I started this book with some trepidation. It's over 700 pages. The first two books dragged for a bit before ending on a much stronger note. Getting through that draggy early part is what has kept me from reading book 3 for so long. Well, 255 pages in there is no dragging. The action gets going right from the first page. I didn't realize how much I had forgotten from the last book, but a very convenient summary of book 2 in the back of this one has given me the reminders I need to reorient myself to the story. I'm all in on this one. It should be a fun read.
Finishing the Mistborn series will be another title I can mark as read in the NPR Top 100 Science Fiction / Fantasy list. I spent way too much time entering all the book/series into the spreadsheet I use to record all of my reading activities. I wanted to keep track of how many of those books/series I have read. I have a shelf for this list in Goodreads, but all the series make it hard to know how many of the 100 I have read. The answer is a third. I have finished 34 of the 100 titles. Now, I had to read 69 books to achieve that number. The Malazan books, all 10 of them, are part of that list. The Wheel of Time, which is a 14 book series, is also on the list. There are plenty of single books on that list too. I guess this list (and the Modern Library Top 100 novels) are kind of side quests to my main quest of Book Shelf Zero. Curiously, I think I've read most of the NPR list books that I own. Yes, other than this Mistborn book and the second Kingkiller Chronicles book, I have read all the sci fi/fantasy books that I own on that list. I have a couple of audiobooks that I haven't gotten to yet, but it's nothing like the 17 Modern Library books that I own but have not read. Let's face it, it's more fun to read an adventure in space than an examination of manners!
The contradiction of having a side quest that requires me buying more books when my stated purpose is to read all of the books I already own is not lost on me. I will keep buying books. The challenge is to avoid buying books on impulse. A perfect example of a potential impulse purchase came up this afternoon. A blog I read did a mini-review of a new book. That book just happened to be today's Kindle Daily Deal. Two years ago I would have bought it. It's only $2, what is there to lose?! Having lists like these give me a place to focus my desire to buy. The Sci Fi list is particularly promising place to look for fun books to buy. The entire list is around 315 books. All of those series really add up. Just one entry on the list, number 99, the Xanth series, includes 40 books. There are over 200 books for me to choose from. Well, that's not entirely true. A few of the series have omnibus editions. The Amber Chronicles, number 40, is a good example of this. The series is 10 books, but they are not very long. A single book containing all the novels is less than $20.
Now, the challenge with a book like that is how to account for it in my tracking of unread books. Is it one book or 10? I could see reading one novel from the series, putting the omnibus aside and reading something else, coming back to the next novel in the omnibus, and so on until the series (and the omnibus book) was finished. Would I count each novel from the omnibus as a book read on Goodreads? That would mess up my annual book tracking. I guess I could count them as borrowed books until I finished the 10th novel. It would get (unnecessarily) complicated.
I could try this approach to tracking the individual novels in a book that contains an entire series using some books I already own. I have the Alexandria Quartet in my phone. It's a 4 book series. The entire series is over 800 pages, but each book is only a couple hundred pages. I'm not reading anything on my phone at the moment (all my effort is with Mistborn), but I could start reading Justine, the first book, to see if my new system will work.
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