Thanks! I'm often stunned at how many I end up with as a total, but then I look at what I've read and it puts the number into context, lol. Not a lot of meat in my fiction, and this month most of my non-fiction were shorter works that just breezed by.
If 17 books (or, heck, 7) is a fail, then I don't want to even ... No, definitely too painful to follow that train of thought. For me, the 4 that I did manage in May was an extremely rare high, only achieveable with fast reads and books by one of my favorite writers. Usually it's not even that much ...
To be fair, a lot of these were extremely short (especially Canterville Ghost and the kids book). The books about books were also quite short - well under 300 pages, possibly less than 200.
I suspect your 4 reads are at *least* as meaty as my 17 combined plus, I no longer work the long hours I'm sure you do (although all those long flights were good for reading, lol). :D
Nope. Four standard-length crime novels by Dennis Lehane (and the first two of these, barely 300 pages). Anything beyond that length, and I just know I'll be reading *nothing but* that book for at least the next 3 weeks, if not the whole next month or more. Just started on Salman Rushdie's memoirs (almost 700 pages) ... it'll be a miracle if I'm done with that before the month is out. ;)
Ah, ok. I remember you mentioning somewhere earlier you were starting Rushdie's memoirs and that's what made me think your reading totally outclassed mine at the moment. :D ;)
Thanks y'all. I should clarify: the fail was on the 'assigned' TBR stack, and my lack of self-discipline, not my total numbers. I'm happy with the 17 overall. I was just meant to be a mood reader. :)
Yeah, I wouldn't call 7/11 a fail either. I'm only at about the 20% mark on my annual list of "I really should read these soon" and it's already June! And your 17 definitely beats my measly 11. Not that it's a competition or anything. ^^
My main motivation at calling it at this point, is that the rate of failure (and by that I meant the number of times I wilfully blew off my 'assigned' stack to pick something else) has escalated each month. Rather than continuing to do something I'm clearly not enjoying enough to stick with, I'm just going to embrace my moodiness and go back to letting the books call to me (so to speak). I started this because a lot of my TBR titles were getting 'lost' in the shuffle; I'm hoping the new vertical bookshelf will keep most of my titles visible in a way they weren't before.
That's why I keep my TBR as a vertical stack (reaching up to somewhere around my waist ... and that's just recent purchases and gifts) next to my desk. Impossible to overlook that way! My shelves are housing plenty of other unread books, too, though, which may or may not end up being added to the stack eventually -- or just shortcut their way back into my consciousness in some other fashion. Such as discussions on a book site ... [nods] ... yep, that'll do it ... :D
Good - hopefully this will work then (the vertical, in-my-face part). When I was combing through all my books to scan them, I kept running into books on the TBR shelf that I'd forgotten about and thinking "OH! I want to read this!". So obviously, that wasn't working.
Great month! I wanted to give the whole organisation thing a try, at least. I'm always so impressed with other people's 'this is what I'm reading next month' posts. But nope, it's just not for me. Glad I'm not alone. :)
It was a very satisfying accomplishment, definitely, but can I tell you? I was covered in the dust of the ages. I have rarely felt so grimy... and I regularly dust my shelves, I swear! Just all those books ever so slowly shedding bits of themselves, I guess. Good news though was that I found zero evidence of any bugs that might have been attracted to all that book glue. Yay!
And yes, it was probably me-you didn't make that up; we don't have to pay for holds, but we do have to pay $5 for every ILL (per title). It's another reason I don't use my library as often as I'd like.
Congrats on 17 books! I managed 4 but that's about normal for me :)
I suspect your 4 reads are at *least* as meaty as my 17 combined plus, I no longer work the long hours I'm sure you do (although all those long flights were good for reading, lol). :D
And yes, it was probably me-you didn't make that up; we don't have to pay for holds, but we do have to pay $5 for every ILL (per title). It's another reason I don't use my library as often as I'd like.