Tsundoku

[reidharriscooper]

I gather books in a ways that aren't exactly the average style. While most folks build their library through book stores or in the modern era Amazon, my amassed collection of 5000+ plus novels, graphic stories, cook books, memoirs, art retrospectives are more were acquired through different means. These various means have meant getting more than I can ever read in a life time. It has allowed for me to actually discover writers though and books I never even knew existed.

Here is a not very short list of places I have gotten books:
Library sales with Fill a Bag option (for $10, whatever you fit in a bag is yours)
Fill a Bag sales at The Strand
Fill a Bag sales at various thrift shops
10 cent sales at Webster Library
Swap Meets
random Boxes on the street
ARCS from Book Expos
ARCS from Comic Conventions
Books sent to me for review via publisher
Contest wins
Direct from the writer/artist/author/creator
CostCo
Going out of Business Sales from Virgin Megastore & Tower Records
and even one I never returned to a college library (it's completely out of print and had only ever been taken out once in 25 years...)

Now this isn't to say I've never bought a book full price at Barnes & Nobles. I have had no choice. I have particular holes in collections that I need filled sometimes and that was the only choice. That doesn't mean I've read them. I just wanted to know the book was in my collection so one day I would read it. This could be considered pack ratting but it really isn't. Public libraries are great and all, but there's some supremely satisfying over having a private library that has some version of essentially all the most important books of the last 200 years.

Using a site such as https://thegreatestbooks.org/ I can inexplicably state I have everyone of these books. Now some I may have as a graphic novel, others in an annotated edition, or possibly a modernization. Maybe I only have the film version in some cases as many of these sales included CDs and DVDs. Go through any year on there, even go through the non fiction, my rate of success of owner ship is 75%. My rate of actually reading said books? Maybe 15%.

That's simply because I've done the same thing with films, with music, and even with video games at least on PC. I have at current count 351 games in my Steam Library, I have played 110 of them tops and some of those only a little. Does it count if it was a little? Does that count with a book, if you read a chapter or two but got distracted, so by the time you ever pick up the book again you'd need to re-read those chapters anyways? I don't know. I don't have the answers, but what I do have our a lot of books with theories, queries, mysteries, solutions, and mishmosh... but they also won't have answers. Well, one book has an answer. It's one of the few books in this ridiculous collection I have read more than once, watched versions of multiple times and even listened to radio plays about. That answer is 42. Now the only problem is... what was the question?

written for therealljidol LJ Idol presents Literary Prize Fight Week 3

Comments

[reidharriscooper]

Right now it's a mish-mosh of different kinds of shelves of different sizes, sometimes double stacked, some books in drawers, others in piles, some on the coffee table. They're wherever a book can go. I wish it was a floor to floor. That's the one day dream home.