More on that New Years Resolution
Posted on: December 18, 2010
I’m half way through two books that just aren’t doing it for me, so no review for you today. If I don’t finish either of these books by Monday, I may write my first DNF review, because I really, really, really want to get to something else.
no review tomorrow either, as I’m sure I’ll still be ranting about my hatred (ooops sorry, my severe dislike!) for e-books and e-readers.
In an effort to read what I’ve got next year, I finished catalogued all the books I own! Ok, I catalogued all the fiction, I cheated and only counted the non-fiction.
Crammed into our one bedroom apartment we have 437 fiction titles and 200 non fiction titles.
of the 437 fiction titles I have read 62% of them. that means there are 164 unread fiction titles in this home!
More useless facts about my home library, after the jump!
random facts about my home library:
Top authors owned, and how many of those titles I’ve read:
author qty owned qty read
Robert Heinlien 17 15
Frank Herbert 13 10
Katherine Kurzt 15 zero!!
Raymond E Fiest 16 maybe 1?
Robin Hobb 9 3
Manga titles owned: 80. Holy crap, I own eighty manga & graphic novels? no wonder I have no money!!!
eighty. I know drug habits that aren’t that expensive!! damn!
now that I’ve recovered from that, let’s get back to books.
Where should I start with Katherine Kurtz? Have never read anything by her, but my husband loves her. Looks like we have a bunch of Deryni books, some Camber of Culdi stuff, and some King Kelson stuff.
How about the Raymond E Fiest? I may have read Magician: Apprentice, or at least started it. There’s a bunch of Krondor stuff, Magician Apprentice, Magician Master, Prince of the Blood, Shadow of a Dark Queen. . . any good? worth reading?
The Robin Hobb, the husband has been buying faster than I can read, I have plans to read it all eventually.
there’s plenty (164!!) of other random unread titles and authors like Robert Jordan, Timothy Zahn, H Beam Piper, Anne McCafrey, etc, and a metric ton of read titles that I plan on re-reading over the next year, like Tim Powers, Isaac Asimov, Gene Wolfe, Kurt Vonnegut, Sheri S Tepper, and more!
oy, I better get back to those two titles that just aren’t doin’ it for me. one of them is an ARC that I’m just very saddened by, the other is a brand new title from the library (2 weeks, no renewals) by an author whose older stuff I love, which makes this new title even more of a dissapointment. I need more coffee and pumpkin biscuits. Yes, I made pumpkin biscuits last night and they were divine. dump a whole bunch of tasty stuff in a bowl, drop onto cookie sheet, bake, enjoy!!
8 Responses to "More on that New Years Resolution"
December 20, 2010 at 9:03 am
Mieneke, I’ve heard the same about the Feist, that his early stuff is great. I’m pretty sure we have that Feist/Wurts series as well.
Rebekah – welcome! lol! when my husband and i moved in together, we found we had three and four copies of some titles. these days, we’re buying and trading stuff at the used bookstore so often that I only attempt to catalog or count the stuff every five years or so. But I would never call it “organized”. One day we might have enough space and enough bookcases to shelve it all!
I’ll post that recipe in the next few days.
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December 20, 2010 at 10:18 pm
Good for you, both on the cataloging and on the percentage of fiction titles that you’ve actually read out of that bunch. I should do the same thing, though I’m afraid I would fall into a much lower percent of finished vs. to be read. If I get time to do this over the holiday break I’ll come back and report what I’ve found out, even if it shames me. 😉
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December 21, 2010 at 9:19 am
I’ll be expecting some results then, young man! 😉
when I started this, I really expected my %age of read vs unread to be closer to 40-50%.
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December 25, 2010 at 3:55 pm
wow.. I havent heard any of them…
I will look for them =)
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April 8, 2011 at 10:06 am
On Feist: I think the “Empire” trilogy (Feist/Wurts) is almost universally considered the best thing he ever wrote. I thought it was Not Bad – better than pulp fantasy and not a total waste of time as cheap entertainment, but not on the level of, say, Martin. Of the rest, people usually say the original Magician is the best. And that the later on you go the worse the books get.
That said, the Serpentwar books, as I recall, are a highpoint (the first three of the four, at least). They seem to be the one time Feist decided to do something different from his usual fair, and although they’re not literature I found them excitingly different when I was younger. The first book is based on the conceit of The Dirty Dozen, while the second book is about stock market trading and the third book is an apocalyptic war – all in a medieval fantasy setting. It’s like he got bored of the usual heroic princes and decided to see if he could do something different. Then he realised that was hard work and went back to retelling the same story again and again. It varies from ‘entertaining in a way but utter trash’ (King’s Buccaneer and Prince of the Blood, iirc, which I loved as a child but couldn’t re-read at all a few years ago) to ‘appallingly bad even as pulp’ (the “Krondor: the __” trilogy, his computer game adaptations). Plus, the man can’t get his damn continuity straight.
Of the rest, I can only comment on Jordan. It’s worth a read if you think you might like epic fantasy. It’s VERY epic. The first is very rip-offy, the second is better, and it peaks around the Book 3-6 mark. At its best, it’s notable for its complicated plots and introduction of an almost whodunnity element to the fantasy genre through conspiracies and traitors and other mysteries. But it gets slower and slower, until the point where the ratio of dress-descriptions, all-female spanking sessions and women sniffing contemptuously to actual PLOT approaches 1000:1, and I just gave up. I suspect it might be easier to tolerate now that you don’t have to wait two years for every book, though.
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the Little Red Reviewer 
December 18, 2010 at 4:43 pm
I love Feist! Start with Magician and read them in order would be my recommendation 🙂 A lot of people think his later work is not as good as the earlier ones, but the original five books and the serpentwar saga are awesome! I also love the other books, especially the Empire trilogy he wrote with Janny Wurtz.
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December 20, 2010 at 2:48 am
I’m oh so afraid of trying to catalogue my books! I managed to sort them into something resembling order the last month. Fiction (that I”m not currently reading) in the living room. Non-Fiction in the bedroom/office. The non-fiction is pretty easily broken down into categories, but as far as the fic goes….the most organizing I’ve managed to do is YA/Juvenile vs Everything else.
Oh and I found duplicates of at least three books that I wasn’t even aware I had a single copy of! Sheesh.
P.S. Pumpkin Biscuits sound divine. Any recipes to share?
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December 20, 2010 at 5:41 pm
Yes, you know it’s bad when you are buying new bookcases every four months or so. lol.
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