I violated my not rule of not buying a book if I'm at xx9, I was at 149 unread owned books on Friday. I checked the Kindle Daily Deal, as I do every day, and saw that The Hydrogen Sonata, book 10 of the Culture series, was on sale for $2.99. That's $7 cheaper than the normal ebook price and several more dollars cheaper than the paperback. I bought the book after asking my wife what I should do. She said it was $7 more to spend at Disney World. I made the purchase.
Thinking about it now, it would have been a mistake for me not to buy the ebook regardless of some silly rule I put in place to rein in my rampant book buying desires. I'm planning on reading all of the Culture books so they are in essence already in my reading queue. They are not available at the library so if I'm going to read them, I'm going to have to buy them. I wasn't pushing into new book reading territory with this purchase. I was filling in a gap that I will have to address in the not to distant future anyway. So I'm back up to 150.
I could have saved myself this ludicrous exercise in maintaining some kind of self-imposed consistency if I could get through The Horse's Mouth. It's taken me over a month to get about three quarters of the way though a 400 page book. It's not a bad book, I would just rather read something else. I'm trying to make sure I read at least 10-15 pages a day, but I'm not always very consistent in meeting that goal. It's particularly hard when I have much more intriguing reads going on my phone. I started Never Let Me Go after finishing Leaving the Atocha Station. I was just checking out the first few pages to see if I should read that or one of my other borrowed ebooks next. I was sucked in before I had a chance to consider anything else. The Horse's Mouth just has nothing to offer that compels me to spend time with it rather than Ishiguro's much more gripping (and better written) story. It's hard to put down Never Let Me Go.
I will probably finish Never Let Me Go well before I finish The Horse's Mouth. If I managed 15 pages a day, a very modest goal that would take me 20 minutes to meet, I would finish The Horse's Mouth in about a week. I need to get that book behind me. I picked it up to get another owned book down before reading Inversions, the sixth Culture book, thinking it would be pretty quick. Big mistake. My book reading pace has been maintained, I've read 4 library books while slogging through The Horse's Mouth, but Book Shelf Zero progress has ground to a crawl.
The rationalization contortions I have put myself through over The Hydrogen Sonata merits a revisit to the real purpose of Book Shelf Zero. Yes, part of it is getting to books that I want to read but have not yet gotten around to, but it's also prevents me from jumping into a reading project by buying a bunch of books only to get distracted from that reading project when the next interesting option shows up. I could have really gone crazy and bought at least 3 books from the 21st Century Canon list while at a used book store on Friday. I found several without looking that hard and they were having a buy 2 get one free offer. That would be 3 new books for less than $10. Book Shelf Zero has become ingrained deeply enough that I relied on that goal to walk out the door empty handed (but with the knowledge that I have a rich source of certain books available for a few bucks).
The battles I set up for myself are getting a bit ridiculous. Don't buy that, read more of this, get to this book before my loan period ends. It's draining!
No comments:
Post a Comment