This is where the resolution starts to hurt, with the new book lists. I somehow managed to avoid nearly all of the Most Anticipated Books of 2012 posts and articles around New Year, but it was only so long before I clickety-clicked my way to temptation. It came this week, in the unexpected form of the Waterstones 11 - the bookshop chain's picks for the hotly anticipated debuts of the year. The list doesn't hold many suprises, and is determinedly white, anglo-centric and dominated by contemporary realism (although, lots of women writers - hurrah!). But it doesn't take much to inspire booklust in me at the moment. I like the sound of The Snow Child by Eowyn Ivey, a nice bit of fairytale-realism; The Panopticon by Jenni Fagan has an intriguing synopsis; Absolution by Patrick Flannery could be the worst type of navel-gazey literary fiction or the best; and I'm even intrigued by Chad Harbach's The Art of Fielding, the newest 'Great American Novel' about baseball, a subject ordinarily far from my heart.
But, no no no no no. I will not pre-order and I absolutely will not fish for review copies. Instead I will sidestep over to my shelves and pick off a Waterstones 11 of last year: Patrick de Witt's The Sisters Brothers. I'm feeling in the mood for another American voice in the wake of To Kill a Mockingbird (a post to follow) and I'm hoping its newness will take the edge off my sudden desire for something recent.
The shelves where de Witt has been sitting are looking a little lighter this weekend, after a huge TBR purge. Over the last two days I have filled five huge cardboard boxes and, averting my eyes and holding my breath, handed them over to the local Hospice charity shop. Painful at first, but then an enormous relief. It was difficult to start with and my first pass over the shelves turned up only half a dozen books that I'd read and was willing to get rid of; the second pass a handful more that I knew I didn't want to read (books I'd been sent unsolicited, or started and not finished). This was never going to do the job required, since my determination was to cut the number of books by a quarter. On the third pass I employed a new set of criteria: Had I read it before? If so, was I planning to re-read it in the next two years? If not, was I realistically going to read it in the next three years? If the answer to either of these questions was 'no' then in the box it went.
A pattern started to emerge. In went volume after volume of epic fantasy: series that I last read as a teenager; series where I had read the first book and acquired the rest but was very unlikely to re-visit; series that I had acquired over a decade ago and was unlikely to start at all. Lots of Katherine Kerr, Tad Williams, Robin Hobb, Stephen Donaldson. Many I had bought second hand after reading library copies and then never cracked open again. Once I started to put them in the charity box a mist seemed to clear. The crippling nostalgia was gone and I was plucking books off the shelves left, right and centre. I felt thoroughly liberated. Instead of deluding myself about what I should, would or could read, I focused on what I really wanted to read. It still wasn't easy, but the rhythm carried me and I feel much better for it now. Good stuff. Perhaps by the end of the year I will have halved the pile and thoroughly refocused my reading life.
Week 3 Statistics
Books completed: 2 - To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee; and I also finally finished Edward Burne-Jones: The Last Pre-Raphaelite by Fiona MacCarthy.
Books bought: 0
Books acquired: 0
Books given away to charity: 74 (eep! but also hooray!)
Books added to Amazon wishlist: 2 - Yes, only two! Ironically one of them is the first volume in an epic fantasy trilogy.
~~Victoria~~