The Reading Trap

When I started posting here, some months ago, one of my goals was to post reviews, review articles, and essays, based on my reading. I got as far as listing the books I read in May, 2007, and making some comments on them. Here it is, late May of 2008, and I'm a year behind in posting about my reading. I'm also close to a year behind in my periodical reading. I have been reading today in the July/August 2007 issue of Foreign Affairs. I have finished the July/August 2007 issue of The Atlantic, but I have only completed the June 2007 issue of Commentary. I'm even behind in the weekly magazines: yesterday I read the April 26, 2008, issue of The Economist, while today I got through the April 28 issues of Information Week and U. S. News & World Report.

Then there are the books, both mine and the Pikes Peak Library District's, which are piled up beside my bed and in the study, unread or partially read. I made good headway into the backlog I had accumulated before New Year's, but more books keep throwing themselves into my path. Old books and new books, fiction and non-fiction, collections and anthologies. And series!

I had the aim of getting rid of some of the books in my study, and I boxed some up and donated them to the library. But there were some others I decided I need to read before I disposed of them. I have a lot of books by Pierre Berton, a Canadian journalist and historian. I haven't lived in Canada in a long time, so I should be able to live without these books. But the two-volume set on the building of the Canadian Pacific Railway - The National Dream and The Last Spike come to over 1,000 pages.

I have The Last Enchantment by Mary Stewart, and I was going to read it and then give it away. But my wife read it first, and she not only liked it, she discovered it was the third volume in a four-book series. So now I've read The Crystal Cave, and I'll need to read The Hollow Hills, before I can even start on The Last Enchantment. This isn't getting me anywhere very quickly.

The long and short of it is, I don't have as much time to blog about books as I hoped to have, because I'm spending way too much of my time reading the books in the first place. I'll try to do better in future, but I make no promises.

All contributions on books and the experience of reading are welcome here.