as soon as classes ended last may and my high school job ended in june i started reading. i’ve had a backlog of books since the san francisco public library book sale TWO YEARS AGO. i set myself a goal of eliminating as many books as possible before THIS year’s sale. i was not really very successful. partially because i’ve continued buying new books on a regular basis. and also because kim’s mom gave me 2 huge boxes of YA advance copies. so now (well, 2 weeks ago), i took pictures of the books i’d read this summer, the books i still had to read, and the new books from kim’s mom.
first my “to-be-read shelf”.
“that’s more like 2 shelves, michele,” you might be thinking. well, BAM!
it’s really more like 4 shelves. sadly.
then there’s the piles of advance copies i just got:
the above are the ones i kept. i’ve already read or given up on over half of them.
ones i dumped from the get-go. and by “dumped” i mean i drove them over to the juvenile hall and donated them. alison, the librarian, emailed me later to say she was squealing over lots of them since the kids have been requesting them but they’re not in paperback yet (JHs can’t have hard-backs because you could injure someone with one).
and finally, some of the ones i actually read this summer (and have kept). yey! completed books! i’ve also sold off a lot of them already so this isn’t everything. but, you know, a good representative sample.
plus i’ve read some more in the 2 weeks since i took these pictures. maybe 8 or 9 more? and because i am a dolt, i’ve also bought more. maybe 7 more. this is a horrible vicious cycle. kristen and i have a made-up language for books. when they’re new they’re “shiny” because they still have that attractive luster which made you buy them. brand-new, glistening with promise. but then when they sit on your to-be-read shelf(ves) for too long they get “stale”. their appeal fades and the loss of glamor is unappetizing. old, boring.
oh well, ever more books. what can you do? backlog is a necessary evil, i guess.
kittens.
also a necessary evil.
I really love this post. Because of the parts with the books.
Let’s look it squarely in the face, missie: Are you gonna power through Earth, then Sea, then Sky, in the week before the book sale? No. Were you, in fact, going to power through them this summer? No.
“Missie” is Erica’s thing, I think, but I must have picked it up.
Fishstix so cute! He’s gonna be so handsome….
sigh. stupid ‘earth’, ‘sea’, ‘sky’. i got them as discards from the high school. they’re actually pretty cool; they’re compilation things of essays, short stories, poems, plays, etc. that correspond to the theme of the book.
all right they need to be purged. i know. maybe ‘ships’ too.
btw, i like the reactions of you two.
kris: books!
nuala: kittens!
it’s very true to your personalities.