Sci-fi and Heroic Fantasy discussion

I just saw this blog post from Tor.com and it could have been written by me, including being Canadian part (though I don't have nearly that much spare time, nor do I win many advanced reading copies from GR anymore)

https://www.tor.com/2018/03/01/climbi...

But I must admit I do acquire books faster than I can read them, resulting in some serious shelf space issues. Maybe one of many reasons I tend to avoid ebooks, at least the physical ones take up space and help to remind me I don't have any more room (let alone time) to add more :)

Must admit though, in the grand scheme of things, the "having too many books problem" is not such a bad one really...I mean, really, can one have too many books?

I currently own 426 books with plans of purchasing at least one more before the week is up.

But I read an essay one time about a man describing the books on his shelves not as a task, but as support. He argued that having several books on your shelves and never reading them wasn't a waste, but that the books were there should you need them. Kind of the same argument Woody uses in Toy Story about toys, and how their purpose is to be there when they're needed by Andy or anyone.

With that in mind, cheers to another 100 books!

of course, is that a problem?

Saul wrote: "But I read an essay one time about a man describing the books on his shelves not as a task, but as supp..."

I have a room full of books. My sister has a room full of stuffed animals. I can see that this argument works quite well :) There is something warm and fuzzy about being surrounded by walls of books!

I refuse to believe I'm never going to get through them all. All I have to do is not buy any more until I've read them all. And don't check any out from the library. And don't watch movies. Or work. Or eat...

At any given time I own one unread book, which is the next one i plan to read. I've always done it that way. Is that weird?

I'm approaching 15,000 Kindle books in the Amazon Cloud. I usually add 30 or 40 whenever I make up my lists of free Kindle books, which is every week or two.

I am of the opinion that one can never have to many books. But I do purchase them much faster than I can read them. Oops. My husband thinks I should get rid of some but I can’t. They are like my babies. Ah well, I guess we will just have to have a library instead of a living room.

I remember the Good Old Days of British SF Conventions, when one of the highlights of the weekend was the great Pete Weston running an auction, selling off second-hand pulp by the boxful, under the slogan of 'Great Radiation Protection'.
Fond memories, Pete. RIP.

Tanya wrote: "I am of the opinion that one can never have to many books. But I do purchase them much faster than I can read them. Oops. My husband thinks I should get rid of some but I can’t. They are like my ba..."

Don't get me started on trying to part with books after I read them. Even if I didn't much care for the book I'm usually able to find some aspect of it that I liked so I'm always thinking "maybe I'll read that again..." Of course given I have more than I could read once, the chance of reading a mediocre one twice is very low. I made a tiny dent last year, will need to try again this year as I am literally without shelf space, even after spilling into multiple rooms.

Alan wrote: "Great Radiation Protection."

Oooh, I should try that excuse to put up more shelving...

At least with book prices getting ridiculously high in Canada now I've actually stopped buying quite as many. But then my friend convinced me to go to the library and now I'm probably bringing in more books than ever before (but at least I'm forced to bring them back afterwards!)

Andrea wrote: "Tanya wrote: "I am of the opinion that one can never have to many books. But I do purchase them much faster than I can read them. Oops. My husband thinks I should get rid of some but I can’t. They ..."

Andrea. I get you.

It takes an extreme act of will to actually get rid of books. I've started to make some progress by gathering several books I'm unlikely to read or try again and selling them, usually for store credit at either Powell's or Wallace Books (I live in Portland). That way, I can get many fewer books back but books that I actually want to read. Small dent indeed.

Most of my books are ebooks. Like Randy, I can't resist free books if they look even remotely good, and I've found some real gems this way! But I do have to accept the fact that I'll have to return as a ghost if I want to read them all.

Brendan, hats off to you. I used to be like that before I own a Kindle.

Andrea, I think you can have as many ebooks or audios you want but the print ones, if you don't read them in two years you better give or donate to someone else. Print books should be read and not gathering dust. Currently I only buy prints if they are collectors edition like the Harry Potter illustrated or coffee table books.

Having said that, I am now joining some book reading and buying ban challenges, i.e. I try to finish three books before buying a new one and I don't start a new series before I finish/read up to date/abandon five.

Brendan wrote: "At any given time I own one unread book, which is the next one i plan to read. I've always done it that way. Is that weird?"

Only because it's so extremely sane and logical.

Silvana wrote: "Having said that, I am now joining some book reading and buying ban challenges, i.e. I try to finish three books before buying a new one and I don't start a new series before I finish/read up to date/abandon five."

I do try to avoid buying new series, though of course there are some really good ones out there that make sense to start. But while the library eats away at reading the books I already own, whenever I see a book in a store I look at it and say to myself "could I just borrow this instead of buying it?" often the answer is yes. Also, I'm more inclined to get rid of those mediocre books I own and have read if the library has it since I know if I ever do end up with the urge to read it again I can still get it.

As for the eReader, so much free/cheap stuff! I get the Kindle daily deals (which I generally don't act on), and of course there are the announcements in our group for deals, but even if free I know there isn't time to read them all so I try to resist. :) Also the freebies (other than classics) are where I actually care what reviewers think since free books can either be amazing, or feel like it's written by an illiterate gorilla (actually the gorilla could do better sometimes). On the other hand, I don't mind deleting a badly written book I got for free, and it's not like I don't have room on my desktop's harddrive to store a whole bunch just in case LOL

I should try Brendan's way and only buy a book when I finish the ones I have (but then I wouldn't buy anything new for years already, hehe) but I just can't resist when I see something that looks really good :)

Kindle daily deal is the devil.

I have so many books in my wishlist and not buying those in discounts takes a lot of willpower.

Lucky the US dollar exchange rate is crazy nowadays, I could always refrain from buying those above 3 bucks.

Silvana wrote: "Kindle daily deal is the devil...."

Yeah, sales are the undoing. When I bought a Kindle I figured I'd collect fewer unread books since a trip to the bookstore was right in my hand. Except, something interesting goes on sale, click.

yes

G33z3r wrote: "Silvana wrote: "Kindle daily deal is the devil...."

Yeah, sales are the undoing. When I bought a Kindle I figured I'd collect fewer unread books since a trip to the bookstore was right in my hand...."

And it's always the case of, well, if I don't buy it now but I want to read it later, then I'll have to pay full price, so better grab it when it's cheap! Very hard to resist that urge.

Theoretically, no. But I keep buying them faster than I can read.

Thank you all for confirming that I'm not alone in my obsession/addiction nor the excuses I use to justify it.
;)

About a decade ago, I built a book case at the base of my bed & the top shelf is just for books that I plan to read. I figured I wouldn't buy too many that way since I'd keep knocking them off when I made the bed. Yeah... well, it happens. Occasionally I go through & decide I'm never going to read a few, so I donate them to the little library at the local store. The empty spaces last for a while.

Electronic books, forget about it. I'm very careful to download them all & file them away on my backup drives, but I'll never get around to reading them all. I do have a nice selection to choose from, though.
:)

Isn't that one of the prerequisites for being a member of the Goodreads community? LOL. I'd be shocked if there was a single person on here that has read every book in their collection.

Brendan wrote: "At any given time I own one unread book, which is the next one i plan to read. I've always done it that way. Is that weird?"

Nope, I don't think it's weird. I'm very similar in that I usually only buy books that I plan to read next. So if I liked the first book of a trilogy I'll go out and buy the next two books to read right away, and so on. Part of it is not having the income nor the space to buy tons of books I don't plan to read immediately. The other is probably the "completionist" part of my personality. Having tons of unread books would really grate on my nerves.

At the moment, though, I'm actually guilty of owning 12 books that I have yet to read. Though I think only 5 of those books are ones I actually bought myself (2 of which I will be reading very soon). 1 of those 12 is one of the last books of a series that I haven't yet started (it was an Xmas gift from my mother who I think got a bit confused by all the "Assassin" titles in Robin Hobb's bibliography, haha), and the other 6 are all Warhammer 40k books that I got for free from my building's laundry room. People often put unwanted books for others to take down there, so I ended up with 2 Ravenor trilogy books and I think 4 Gaunt's Ghosts books. Plan on reading the 2 Ravenor books once I get the first of the trilogy from the library.

NekroRider wrote: " that I got for free from my building's laundry room. People often put unwanted books for others to take down there"

Well it would be silly to pass on free books. We had this one weird morning when I came out of my house only to find that someone had dumped three boxes full of books on the corner of my driveway. Since I was heading out to work I didn't have time to dig through it much (found one Grisham book) and by the time I got home it was pretty well picked through so wasn't anything else we wanted. But I wonder if someone on my street knew that my house would be happy to get a big pile of free books (even if I ended up bringing most of them to a charity bookstore)

I live in an extremely small place, where space is at a premium. I have a lot of old books which, mostly for sentimental reasons, I don't want to get rid of. Therefore, there is very little room for new books, I purchase them one or two at a time, just before reading them, and afterwards I most often give them to a local second-hand library.
I don't have a Kindle device, and I have tried to read some books on my PC or on my Android tablet; it strains my eyes. I like traditional paper-based books.

Pierre wrote: "I live in an extremely small place, where space is at a premium. I have a lot of old books which, mostly for sentimental reasons, I don't want to get rid of. Therefore, there is very little room fo..."

You might want to borrow a kindle to try. I can't read on any other screen, but the kindle is easy on my eyes. It's not paper but in a small space it's a lifesaver. Plus... so many free books.

And re the OP... well of course I do. Even not counting the kindle and all the free books. My happy place is made of piles of books and DVDs.

Pierre wrote: "I don't have a Kindle device, and I have tried to read some books on my PC or on my Android tablet; it strains my eyes. I like traditional paper-based books."

Anything with a glowing screen is killer on the eyes, that's why I haven't gotten around to reading any of the free kindle books I have because I only have a Kindle Fire. However if you get a device that uses e-ink like the Kobo or Kindle Paperwhite then it's very close to reading a paper book. When I first saw one I didn't think the device was turned on, that they had just glued a picture of the text on the screen :)

On the flip side, those e-ink devices aren't useful for anything else that a tablet would be like visiting webpages or playing games because of the slow refresh behaviour of the screen. It's really only good for reading books....and not PDF books unless you don't mind reading it really small (or zooming in and moving around on that slow refresh screen). But for epub or mobi these e-ink devices are great, especially when on the go.

I will admit to still having a preference for paper books when reading at home, e-reader is still not quite the same (flipping pages is actually kind of hard to do on an e-reader, though don't have to worry about your bookmark falling out)

e-ink with the backlight turned off is very easy on the eyes, potentially even easier than paper since you can make the text larger. I can't read anything bigger than a short story on a tablet/pc without getting eyestrain.

I find the Kindle Paperwhite more pleasant to read than most printed books. There's no glare, no heavy weight on my knee if I'm reading a long book, and no fighting with an uncooperative spine that keeps trying to close the book while I'm reading it. Best of all, I can choose a print size that's comfortable for me - at the age of 65, my eyes can hardly adjust at all to different print sizes, and even reading glasses sometimes aren't good enough.

The downside in many cases is the presentation of the text. I will not read, let alone buy, any ebook that has a blank line after every single paragraph; it's simply incompetent. And often there are proofreading errors, sometimes quite bad ones (the Kindle edition of Expecting Someone Taller refers in the first chapter to 'the Mbelung's Ring'; at a mis-stroke, we have strayed from Northern Europe to Africa).

But taken altogether, I wouldn't be without my Paperwhite. Now all I need to do is go round all the publishers with a list of their books that I want to read and they haven't yet put on Kindle, and a baseball bat in case they don't immediately see the error of their ways.

there will be a huge book sale later this month in my city - it will be in a convention center and open non stop 24hrs for a week. I am debating myself whether I should come since last year's haul was only half read....

Silvana wrote: "there will be a huge book sale later this month in my city - it will be in a convention center and open non stop 24hrs for a week. I am debating myself whether I should come since last year's haul ..."

You have to go; if you don't you will torture yourself for a week wondering what you might be missing. That's a week out of your life that you will never get back.

This probably only applies only for those reading ebooks on a tablet or phone as opposed to an actual Kindle, but changing your color settings to white text on a black screen helps with the eye strain a great deal.

Yes and even then I go to the library

Mike wrote: "This probably only applies only for those reading ebooks on a tablet or phone as opposed to an actual Kindle, but changing your color settings to white text on a black screen helps with the eye str..."

Ugh, I hate that, I find the letters get burned onto my retina, but I know a lot of people do use that and find it better (it's used for high contract mode for those with sight issues). However the Kindle had a sepia tone as the background and brownish text that I found helped with the glare.