Does Anyone Else Have This Problem?

I find that after completing a book, I have a hard time selecting my next read from my ridiculously long reading list. It's not that there isn't anything good in there: quite the opposite in fact. But even when I have a book I've been dying to read like China Mieville's Kraken or Ian McDonald's The Dervish House, I find myself struggling to get into it. I'm tempted to pick up other books

I think this problem stems from two key points. First, no matter how good a book is, whether it's the latest Joe Abercrombie blood-drenched fantasy or Paolo Bacigalupi's newest eco-SF adventure, the collective quality of the rest of the other choices will always outweigh it. Why read a SF Space Opera when you could be reading Urban Fantasy, Near-future SF, Alternate History, Epic Fantasy, Steampunk, Theopunk, Cyberpunk, Treepunk, Punkpunk? For all that a book is, there is so much more it's not. I know it's stupid to think like this but like Jacob of LOST, I have a hard time selecting which of the many candidates is worthy of my limited reading time. More often that not I false start, reading 20-30 pages of one tome before setting it down in favor or something else.

Adding to this fact is the way I read, which is probably similar to most people. It take me a while to get into a book. I need to reset my brain to read sentences the way the author writes them. I also tend to read every word, in admiration of the skill of writing rather than purely absorbing plot. Authors put a lot of time into their prose and making sure things are worded to their satisfaction, and I feel like a lot of the time and for a lot of readers, that effort is wasted. Few things make me happier than a perfectly worded sentence. Michael Chabon, I'm looking at you.
But anyway, back to the topic of the post. Until I reset my mind for the new prose stylings, I read much slower. Eventually, after 50 or 100 pages my mind is able to acclimate to the new style and I can pick up the pace. More often than not, I read the last three quarters of the book in the same time it took me to read the first quarter if not faster.

Both of these tendencies are particularly problematic when I am reading collections or anthologies. Even more so when they feature multiple authors. An anthology introduces many more clean stopping points, many more prose styles, and many more options than a single novel. And this is ignoring the fact that by the time I adjust to the new style, the story is frequently over. Heck, I've been reading The World Book of SF for about 5 months now.

Don't get me wrong, I enjoy short stories. They just don't get along well with the way my gray matter functions. It just have a hard time moving from one story to the next.

I don't know.

Maybe it's just me.

How Do I Organize My Library?

A few weeks back, John Ottinger III asked members of the book-blogosphere "How do you organize your library?"Over on Grasping For The Wind, you can see my response along with approximately 25 others.

You might also want to check it out if you are a sucker for bookcase porn of the SFW variety there is also a full complement of accompanying images.
Here's a sneak preview of my library (although its about to change with the big move).

Ok, not really... But I wish...

The display bookcase

SF Masterworks

The Overflow

These bookcases are all past tense as I am now in the midst of moving to a new place (explains the lack of posts recently). Once I figure out what the plan is for the new place, I should be able to post my newly shelved and newly organized library.

Anyway, head on over to Grasping for the Wind and see how everyone else does it.

SF Masterworks Relaunch (or Golancz Mocks Me)

On Monday, I posted about finally getting the last book in the Gollancz's 73 odd book SF Masterworks Series. Wooooooo!!!, right?

So today, I am minding my own business on twitter. And then I see this:

Gollancz: First cover from SF Masterworks Feb relaunch (new covers, matt lam, new typsetting AND with new intros) is in and looks gorgeous. V. excited

Not Cool Gollancz. Not. Cool.

My first response:

A little bit more digging reveals they are indeed relaunching the series with a mix of old and new titles in new editions with intros from SF writers like Adam Roberts and Graham Sleight.

February Relaunch (All Rereleases)
The Rediscovery of Man - Cordwainer Smith
Gateway - Frederik Pohl
The Fifth Head of Cerberus - Gene Wolfe
Cities In Flight - James Blish
The Forever War - Joe Haldeman
Do Androids Dream Of Electric Sheep? - Philip K. Dick
I Am Legend - Richard Matheson
Lord Of Light - Roger Zelazny
Babel-17 - Samuel R. Delany
The Stars My Destination - Alfred Bester The Stars My Destination

May Books
Cat's Cradle - Kurt Vonnegut - New
Inverted World - Christopher Priest - New

June Books
Childhood's End - Arthur C. Clarke  - Rerelease
The Island Of Doctor Moreau - H.G. Wells - New

July Books
Helliconia - Brian Aldiss - New
The Time Machine - H.G. Wells - Rerelease

You can see all the gory details here.

Out of the 16 books on the calender thus far, 4 of them are new releases. The rest are rereleases...

I guess the covers are decent (especially The Time Machine) but still I'm reluctant to get involved again. The biblioholic in me is scared. I need to know...

-Will the spines be different?
-Will the numbering restart?
-Will they line up nicely on the shelf?

I don't know who makes these decisions but if you are they: What did I ever do to you?

Don't Call Me Ahab...

...because I landed my white whale. After years of off-and-on searching that evoked memories of Harrison Ford's The Fugitive, I finally turned up a copy of the unobtainium-bound book!

On to the shelf you go...

The full 70+ book collection.

That is all.

My White Whale

My name's Patrick and I'm an biblioholic.

Hi Patrick!!!

Last week at SF Signal, John raised the question "Which books have you bought more than once?"

The answer, at least for me, is not that many. I keep my books nice and I obsessively keep track of what I have so outside of a few beautiful Subterranean Press editions, my collection features few duplicates.

What interested me most about John's post was a picture of his duplicate SF Masterworks titles. I like John, have a few SF Masterworks titles of my own. And by a few, I mean most of them. And by most of them I mean all of them, minus one. It's taken a long time and a lot of help from the UK Book Depository but I've acquired a decent quality edition of every single one of Gollancz

The one book missing from my collection is none other than H.G. Wells's classic, The Invisible Man rereleased as SF Masterworks #47 and assigned ISBN 1-85798-949-X. As a clarification, I didn't need to look that information up. I've memorized it. I've searched what feels like hundreds of websites from foreign Amazon.com sites to online book stores to ebay.co.uk. Nothing. I have various notifications set up if the ISBN appears on some of the better sites.  I've even googled (it's a verb) the ISBN trying to find people that have reviewed the book that might be willing to part with it. Yes it's creepy and no it didn't work. Anytime I happen by a used book store I haven't been in before I stop in a look around. I've found a couple of Year's Best Science Fiction Collection (my other project) but finding used UK editions in the US is like finding a well-adjusted adult Twilight fan.

I've come close. There was the eBay.co.uk auction of 2007, when I refused to pay $120 for a single paperback. There was the false hit of 2008, when a used book store turned up a SF Masterworks edition but shipped me a run of the mill Penguin classic edition. Check the ISBNs! Then there was the shameful false hit of 2009, which I'm fairly confident involved the same shady bookseller. Again, I was promised the SF Masterworks edition. Again, I received a small crappy copy of the book I already had. Those people just don't understand. I hope those isbn ignorant bastards burn in hell with the heat of a hundred thousand suns. Eventually a few days pass and I forget about my white whale. I return to my normal life, not caring about which edition of which book I don't own. But then something triggers my passion again and the cycle starts once more and I hunt this book like Eugene Tooms looks for livers during hibernation season.

This time it was John's post with the picture of his SF Masterworks editions that did it. I've regressed once more into my ISBNOCD.  But 2010 might be my year. A search last week turned up not one but two potential matches. I ordered both. One from Powell's in the US and another from a used bookstore out of the UK. I also picked up a copy of Harlan Ellison's classic anthology Dangerous Visions, another book which has been difficult to get a copy of. Cross your fingers, I might have just landed the big one. We will see what shows up.

Oh and if anyone needs a copy of the regular edition of The Invisible Man you can buy in any bookstore, let me know. I've got two.