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Bookweek

This has been a week of books for me. I hadn't read much since my Austen binge back in the fall; after zipping through Party Monster, I was stymied by a rather boring biography of Ben Franklin. What snapped me out of the reading lull was our vacation in February, which prompted me to grab a bought-years-ago-but-never-read title off the shelf in our guest room: Soul of a New Machine, by Tracy Kidder. I then decided to tackle The Da Vinci Code, which I'd wanted to read for over a year; my mom got to it first, and she lent me her copy. I read it in about two days, and I found myself wanting to write a capsule review immediately after finishing it.

This led me to finally convert my previously-static book reviews into a mySql database and add some new reviews... which in turn has made me want to read more.

Lucky for me, Al and I decided to spend most of the day today weeding through our combined book collections. We pulled out old paystubs, airline tickets, grocery lists, and drugstore receipts that originally served as bookmarks but that now serve as lifemarks and separated the volumes into Keep, Sell, and Toss piles. I also started a fourth, unlabeled pile, which I referred to as "Books I Want to Read (or Finally Get Rid Of) Soon". I have a habit of buying books off the New Releases or bargain tables three or four at a time, and then only reading one of them. I forget that I have a backlog of interesting books—or I switch from non-fiction to fiction or vice versa—and I go out and buy three or four more. Al must do something similar, because he had quite a few books that he'd never read, either.

So the reason the sorting turned out to be lucky for me is that I'm trying to be more frugal—and with a stack of books I can read now, and another stack I can trade at a used bookstore for other titles later, I may not have to buy a new book for a good long while.

Among the books I bought for myself months or years ago and forgot about:

Camberwell Beauty, by Jenny Eclaire (purchased, I think, on my last trip to London in 2001)
In Pursuit of the Proper Sinner, by Elizabeth George
an underachiever's diary, by benjamin anastas
Revenge of the Cootie Girls, by Sparkle Hayter
The Last Manly Man, by Sparkle Hayter
Confessions of an Ugly Stepsister, by Gregory Maguire
The Secret Diary of Anne Boleyn, by Robin Maxwell (ordered from Amazon four years ago)
Jack, Knave and Fool, by Bruce Alexander (picked up at a Girls' Brunch book swap a couple years ago)
Strawberry Tatoo, by Lauren Henderson (ditto)
Good in Bed, by Jennifer Weiner
Blue Highways, by William Least Heat-Moon (purchased on Amazon in 2001 on somebody's recommendation, I can't remember whose)

From Al's collection, I added to the pile:

Next, by Michael Lewis
J.K. Lasser's Real Estate Investing, by Michael C. Thomsett
Power Plays: Shakespeare's Lessons in Leadership and Management, by John O. Whitney and Tina Packer
The New No-Nonsense Landlord, by Richard H. Jorgensen
Founding Brothers, by Joseph J. Ellis

I'm not sure where to start... but first I have to finish a book I'm not particularly enjoying, but which I want to get through so I can move it to the Sell pile (Secret Celebrity, by Carol Wolper, whose The Cigarette Girl I read a couple years ago and liked). Who needs a job when there are books to be read?