My Backlog of Books To Read
People tell me that life allegedly slows down during the hot summer months. Given that I have yet to eat dinner before 8 p.m. this week, I feel a bit skeptical about that statement. However, let’s stipulate that it might be true. A tradition of summer here in the States, particularly the northeast where we savor warm days, is the summer reading list. The thinking goes that people go on vacation, perhaps visit the nearest ocean, and bring a pile of good books that they’ve been saving the rest of the year.
Then there are those, such as myself, who find self-restraint in bookstores and libraries exceedingly difficult. We don’t stockpile books over just one year; that is a practice for amateurs. No, we typically have inventories of unread books that are divisible by 10. When we pass a yard sale, our first thought is whether they’re selling any good books. We go into Barnes & Noble “just to look around;” of course we’re not going to buy anything. And, the teetering piles of paperbacks in our closets notwithstanding, we can’t seem to leave the library without a couple of titles tucked under our arms, promising ourselves that we’ll read them quickly.
Can people like me be helped? Nah. But we can write blog posts listing some of the books we own and plan to eventually read. Here’s a sampler from my hoard collection:
Knuckler: My Life with Baseball’s Most Confounding Pitch by Tim Wakefield with Tony Massarotti
Beggars in Spain by Nancy Kress
700 Sundays by Billy Crystal
Haywire and The Ties That Bind: Tales of the Breaking Dawn, both by Justin Macumber
Nocturnal by Scott Sigler
The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine by Michael Lewis
The Martian Chronicles by Ray Bradbury
Dragons of Winter Night by Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman
The Witching Hour (Lives of the Mayfair Witches) by Anne Rice
Stranger in a Strange Land by Robert Heinlein
A Storm of Swords by George R. R. Martin
Calculating God by Robert J. Sawyer
The Foundation Trilogy by Isaac Asimov
And this is just a fraction of them. You’ll be forgiven for thinking I need a 12-step program.
What it’s in your book pile? List them in the comments, because I clearly need more reading suggestions. And have a great summer!
