I have given up caffeine for the most part, I barely drink anymore, I don’t even eat that much chocolate since it’s making a molar hurt. I gave up cable. But I cannot give up buying books. I lost control of my “To Be Read” pile when I was 16, and for those of you keeping track, that was 20 years ago. 4 of those years I worked at a bookstore. The internet is just making it worse. Here are some of the many places that I find books to buy:
Amazon sends me email with list of books that I will probably like, and they’re often right. And their bargain section – hard to search, but some really great deals. Which they also email. Did I mention the Prime account with free shipping?
More email from Borders. With coupons. Unfortunately, I had my mom use my rewards card and now they think I want inspirational fiction.
Borders also closed a nearby store. I was sad, but, you know, $3.99 hardcover fiction.
NPR author interviews. Usually non-fiction.
qpb.com – this is one of those automatic shipment dealies. Sometimes I forget to cancel the autoship. Oops.
I follow a few authors on twitter. And when they’ve been so nice as to answer back, the least I can do is buy their latest book, right?
And there’s the magical new world of e-books on the iPad: Ibooks (expensive but great formatting), Kindle app (excellent selection, frequent special offers), and free library books (as soon as I get my card renewed.)
My latest enabler is Sarah at Smart Bitches, Trashy Books. No only do her recommendations rock, she’s hilarious and the lively community has eliminated (mostly) the guilt I have for reading genre fiction when I have an English degree. And then her site linked to All Romance, which is cheap, easy, usually DRM-free, and has a crazy variety. And now they send me emails.
Currently, my unread stack – okay, stacks – numbers over 50, and that’s just recent purchases, and doesn’t include e-books that I’ve gotten free or books that have been in my collection for years but have never been read (I’m so sorry, Margaret Atwood – it’s not you, it’s me).
So yeah, I think I’ll go read something.
1 comment
Comments feed for this article
June 8, 2011 at 10:15 am
derscheid
It could be worse, at least most books can be shelved neatly. I still have something like 4 cubic yards of unshelved boardgames that I have to sort, in addition to all the books. A few of the games have standard box sizes (i.e. the Alea big box series that includes Puerto Rico), but for the most part, people just grab whatever’s cheapest at the time to shove their games into.
I pre-ordered Penelope Trunk’s new book that she pimped out on her website, and have a trio of board games pre-ordered from Kickstarter as well (Rolling Freight, 1955: War of Espionage, Eminent Domain).
Also I have not yet read China Mieville’s The Scar or Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell, or House of Leaves; all of which I think were in a stack of books you pushed my way.
I got over the embarrassment of reading genre fiction long before Margaret Atwood did… you should check out some of the interviews where she’s explaining that Oryx & Crake isn’t science fiction, because it’s, you know, just not.
Long ago, in far-away Iowa, I remember methodically reading through the Sci-fi/Fantasy shelves pretty much alphabetically at a one-county-over library. Robert Silverberg is the bomb.