I Like Big Books and I Cannot Lie.

It shouldn't be a surprise to anyone that I love collecting books, and am picky about how keeping track of which ones I have and how they're arranged to the point of being downright OCD.  We've got bookworms and book pack rats on both sides of the family. Teacher, my DNA ate my sanity, can I go home?

So of course, I was ecstatic then, when last weekend we were going through some old things, and I found a big book!

Look at that big book. 

If you can't read that, it's the complete novels of Charles Dickens.

It doesn't look that big.

Yes, that is my hand.

Does it? 

It's actually about a foot tall and wider than my hand, all 2000+ pages of it. It was still in its plastic wrap, unopened, but there were lots of holes, and it was falling off. I might have helped it along a bit. 

That's when I realized that this thing is older than I am. It had been sitting quietly buried somewhere all this time, never read.

I'd better get reading.

What, it's not just there to make my bookshelf look fancy!  

NaNoMongering 5 - It All Started When, Or, The Reading List

Guess what made me want to write? That's right, reading. In school, I was the quiet, shy girl who usually sat by herself, and always had a book. I've been a bookworm all my life. My favorite genres are science fiction and fantasy, but I do occasionally read other stuff. I usually read three or four books at the same time, sometimes even more. Most of the time, there is one fluff book that I'll finish very fast, one 'regular' book (usually a science fiction/fantasy novel), and then one that's taking time for whatever reason (long/complicated/ponderous/outside my comfort zone).

That said, I have lately been neglecting this favorite pasttime. Bad writer. Bad. So: in an attempt to guilt myself into getting into gear, I am posting my reading list.

Currently Reading:

• The Hidden Reality by Brian Greene (Nonfiction/Physics) 
• False Colours by Georgette Heyer (Romance)
• The Graveyard Book by Neil Gaiman (Fantasy)
• No Plot? No Problem! By Chris Baty (Nonfiction)
• Lord Of The Rings: The Two Towers by J.R.R. Tolkien (Fantasy)
• Ringworld by Larry Niven (Science Fiction)

Here is where I hang my head in shame. The reason this list is so long is that three of these books are ones which I started a long time ago, and never finished. One of them was a reread. Hurr durr. Now I get to finish ALL of them before I start anything else! 

I've lately acquired a TON of books, and my bookshelf is a godawful giant messy book pile. It's gotten so bad that I sometimes am at the bookstore and can't remember if I bought a particular book already or not! RED ALERT. Given that I'm the neurotic type who must group everything by awesomeness, by genre, by author, by size, by whether I've read it or not, and by cover style, this chaos is making my inner librarian (who is also my Inner Editor, Frankie) acutely uncomfortable. Oh, and don't even mention all the horizontal books. A book placed horizontally on a bookshelf is an unforgivable offense.

It's worse than a misused semicolon; Q.E.D.

Once I clean out my bookshelf, I'm chasing out the tumbleweed on my Goodreads account. I don't particularly need it as motivation, but the smartphone app has a handy little feature that lets me scan in a book's bar code, and thus automatically add it to my collection. It's a pretty neat way to easily track them...and if I actually muster up the patience to do this, no more racking my brains at the book store to see whether I already bought something!

...And there is a reason that the word NaNoMongering is in the title, isn't there. Well, end of Day 4. Word count total is 5,767, which means I am now 900 words behind.