Category Archives: too many books

July 30, 2014   Miriam   bestsellers, fiction, fun, international literature, Miriam, too many books  
6

Have book, will travel

For me the hardest part of packing for a trip is making sure I have all the books I’ll need to get me through airport delays, long flights, pool lounging, and, of course, for bedtime reading when I’m too tired from a day of strenuous vacationing to fall asleep.  Then, there’s the tricky part:  leaving enough room in my bulging carry-on for the books I will be buying while abroad.  We all have these problems, right? Right?

Well, when I set off for France two weeks ago, I had the equivalent of my bedside table pile on my Kindle, the galleys I got at BEA five years ago of Jonathan Tropper’s This Is Where I Leave You, and a couple of back issues of the Oprah magazine. I congratulated myself on my light packing.

While in the beautiful Aquitaine region, I finished the Tropper and Jo Jo Moyes’ One Plus One (for my neighborhood book club) and I had queued up the Lily King novel that’s been getting so many raves for the flight back home.  Then, it was time to head back to the States.  We had five hours to kill in London and a large W.H. Smith store to browse in.  And they were having a “buy one get one ½ price”  sale on books that had made the British bestseller lists.  So…

Books

Having already logged quite a few miles that day and anticipating an exhausting journey home (frankly, the worst part of international travel is getting on the Van Wyck Expressway to and from JFK airport—it calls itself a road, but it’s really a parking lot), I opted for the lighter seeming of the two books to start.  And so, I dug into Letters from Skye, which feels like a cross between The Notebook and The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society and was not disappointed.  It’s a lovely, easy read with just the right mix of romance and sadness to keep you turning pages.  And, I’m really looking forward to diving into the Wyld book, which appears to be much darker and literary (a bit Gaiman-ish).

The best thing, though, is finding new voices as a result of my travels that I might not have ever stumbled on while on this side of the Atlantic.   Turns out both of the books I picked up in London are available in the U.S., but they were not on my radar.  The fact that they were prominently displayed and discounted at a busy airport store made it easy for me to part with the last of my Euros and take home what is to me the perfect souvenir of my European vacation.

How do you handle books and reading on your trips?  Are you literary over-packers?  Do you have to go into any bookstore you pass—whether in North Carolina or Marrakesh?  Do you jointly archive experiences, scenery, and the narratives you were immersed in while on the road?  What did you read on your last vacation?

 

May 30, 2014   Jessica   BEA, galleys, too many books  
1

Dispatch from BEA

This post comes from the midst of Book Expo America, publishing’s annual trade fair that is staged in the cavernous interior of New York’s Jacob Javits convention center, a glass and steel behemoth hunkered down beside the Hudson. The Javits Center looks a good deal like an airport, complete with footsore travelers,  overpriced food and wheeled luggage, (but without planes, TSA pat-downs or conveniently located bathrooms.)  In the exhibitors halls stretch several football fields worth of booths—some small, some sprawling and beautifully appointed–and all bent on giving stuff away:  books, galleys, catalogs, posters, blads, postcards, totebags,  pens, custom-made gingersnaps…

 Beneath this hive of activity is the  purgatory they call the food court and a complex warren of meeting rooms that are as impossible to find as they are windowless, but where all manner of interesting meetings and panel discussions are taking place. This year, I was determined to attend a few. I sat in on a panel hosted by the Women’s Media Group that explored success amidst the shifting landscape of the publishing industry, where I got to listen to a quintet of accomplished women discuss their career paths. I’d also promised myself that this year I would not return home laden with galleys and books I had no business taking, that I would adhere to a strict look-don’t-take policy.  Of course I broke this promise almost immediately.   But who can say no to so many beautifully packaged, cleverly positioned books?  I am counting the minutes until I can dive into the galley of Michel Faber’s new novel. I loved the Crimson Petal and the White and Under the Skin, and while I rarely think that speculative fiction is my cup of tea, I’m willing to admit my ideas about tea might be wrong.

 Jut a little while ago, I got a funny e-mail message from an editor friend who assiduously avoids BEA, wondering if I actually like attending.  And I do. I like BEA because it affords me an opportunity to see out-of-town editors with whom I’ve previously only corresponded, to reconnect with  old friends (and make new ones in the dependably long queue for the ladies room).  But I love BEA because it is a visual, immersive, and tangible manifestation of people whose lives revolve around reading.

April 23, 2014   Miriam   fiction, fun, Miriam, Publishing, reading, too many books, writing  
10

Series fatigue

Jane and I had dinner with the delightful and very savvy Abbi Glines last night.  During the course of a delicious meal of tapas-like small plates at ABC Cocina (which, in case you’re wondering, we liked better than ABC Kitchen, its sister restaurant), we talked about a number of interesting topics, from trends in fiction categories—ever elusive and often fleeting—to the lasting power of series.  Abbi pointed out that series can get tired after a while and that readers get tired of the characters right along with them, so an author needs to know when to move on to new pastures.

This reminded me of my love of Patricia Cornwell’s early Scarpetta books and how tedious I found the later ones, Sue Grafton’s alphabet mysteries which I lost interest in at about the letter G, and that by the time my son and I were at the 24th Magic Tree House book, I was ready to chuck them all out the window.  It’s possible that I just have a short attention span, but, Richelle Mead’s wonderful Vampire Academy series, for instance, kept me hooked up to the very last page of the final installment.

Sbook serieso, is it that authors don’t know when to put a cash cow out to graze and so keep adding books to a successful series even when the characters would much rather have retired to their home in Florida?  Or is it the readership that is so enamored of the characters and their universe that they keep clamoring for more even after the passion has faded?

Do you read every book in a series or do you find your attention wandering to that fresh, bright newcomer on the next shelf?  And do your favorite series authors maintain their effectiveness over numerous titles?

February 18, 2014   sharon   bestsellers, checklists, Discoverability, fun, too many books  
2

Just Keep Reading

I can’t resist the urge to blog about just one more list. If you follow us on Twitter, you may have already seen this beautiful essay on the literary blog The Millions: 28 Books to Read If You Want To. Don’t panic – it’s not really a list! The essay is celebrating the joy of serendipity in your reading life, urging us all to let go of our Must-Read lists and make room for the books that find us.

I discovered one of my favorite books because the author called our store and charmed the living daylights out of me. I found another in a box of old books that my Russian literature professor left outside his office to give away. So while I do think that you should read the canon if it interests you, I think it’s more important that you read the books that find their own way into your hands.

What follows is a lovely and inspiring meditation on the many ways books wander into our lives, when we’re paying attention to them. And between the lines of the essay is a message for authors who have a book to promote – the best marketing for your work is a reader who’s in love with your story.

You should read the book that you see someone reading for hours in a coffee shop — there when you got there and still there when you left — that made you envious because you were working instead of absorbed in a book.

That’s how the excitement spills from the quiet act of reading to everyone that you meet throughout the day.

This essay is a great relief to those of us with stacks of unread books in our homes and award lists half-checked-off. Trends come and go, bestsellers burn up the charts and then fade into oblivion, but the joy of reading lasts through book after book after book.

Do you keep a TBR list? How did you discover your favorite author?

January 14, 2014   sharon   advice, goals, problem solving, too many books  
3

Stalagmites of Books

This morning I was browsing Twitter while waiting for my coffee to kick in, as usual, and this tweet caught my eye:

“I am making a very important New Year’s Resolution for 2014: read more books and own fewer of them.” –@doughtylouise http://t.co/bKHxs8Jzx2

— Book Keeping (@FSGBookKeeping) 

I’m totally on board with the first half of that resolution, but own fewer books?? This I gotta read.

So I clicked the link and read on to discover the author describing a very familiar predicament:

 

“All around my house – in the bedroom, the spare room, the sitting room – there are interesting geological features.  This is nothing to do with the fact that I live in a Victorian townhouse in North London, nor to do with the clay soil on which it is built.  It’s because I don’t have enough shelves.

These interesting features consist of stalagmites of books – great wobbly pillars of varying heights constantly threatening to come crashing down.”

 

This is a problem I can relate to. Books are stacked on every surface in my apartment, two rows deep on the actual bookshelves, taking over endtable space where normal other people have framed pictures of loved ones, and fighting for position on top of cabinets that more rightfully belong to wine glasses and board games. Like the blog post author, I too can blame my mountains of books on my career – but perhaps it would be more honest to blame my career on my greedy love of books?

It doesn’t help that I’m an inveterate producer of marginalia. Sure, I could check out more library books, or borrow from my friends with similar bibliophilic afflictions. But I love scribbling all over my books – asterisks and exclamation points in the margin, long rambling (and obviously brilliant) thoughts and comparison on the back pages at the end. They frown on writing in library books, I’m pretty sure. And if I start marking up my friends’ books, well, soon I’ll find myself with no friends, just tons of free time on my hands to read…hmmmm, on second thought, that doesn’t sound so bad.

Anyway, you should read the whole blog post, because the author offers a nice and logical plan for accomplishing her read-more-own-fewer book resolution. Have you ever tried to cut down on your own book collection? Any success stories to share?

If all else fails, you can always loan your unwanted/unwritten-in books to me!

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