I am sitting right here, at my desk, and I am staring at a pile of unread books that is actually four different piles -- one on the "to be read" shelf (a bookcase behind my desk), one on the coffee table (which hasn't been used as an actual coffee table in longer than I care to think about; its primary function these days is holding knitting + books), one on the kitchen table (half of the kitchen table, actually, which -- despite heroic efforts -- is always covered in books, requiring us to shove books aside to eat on the table) and one actually on my desk. And I don't have anything to read.
This is kind of like when you open the pantry, stare at completely full shelves, and claim that there is nothing to eat. There are over two thousand books in this apartment. You'd think I'd have some chance of maybe, possibly, perhaps finding a book (or two) in here that would strike my fancy. But alas, all I want to read are things that we don't currently own. And though I hear that they have these fancy new-fangled things called libraries, our city one, despite being excellent -- I'm told -- has shit fucking hours and isn't near enough to public transport for me to get to it on the days when I am awake during the day.
Clearly, someone needs to start an online lending library. Kind of like Netflix for books. You ship me the book, I read it, I ship it back to you. (Yeah, yeah, I know, postage would be prohibitive. And it's not like enough people read for it to be profitable -- which is another rant for another night -- but still. Sometimes, a girl just needs to be able to build thousand-book queues of Stuff She Wants To Read. (I think our Netflix queue is at something insane like 300 titles now. We'd be making better progress, if our average length of possession of a Netflix title weren't something like three months -- but to us, it's worth it to sometimes be able to get a certain movie delivered to your mailbox within 48h.)
(And hey, if you wanna see what I'm reading, sign up for GoodReads and add me as a friend. Or just check my reviews. I do try to review everything I read, even if it's very quick, instead of just rating it. Sometimes the reviews are fun to do, and sometimes they're agony because it's hard to articulate why I feel a particular way, but either way, it's fun.)
I've had a breakthrough on the book, which is good, and it makes it a much better book for it, which is fabulous, but it's also going to entail tons of rewriting, which is not good. And I owe so many people critique/opinions on manuscripts it's not even funny. And I really don't want to talk about the email situation. On the plus side, I finished one of the two short stories, which is going out sometime this week once I finish edits, and a draft reader confirms that I really am right to get excited about it, so!
The spam to this blog is starting to get ludicrous, and so many people seem to prefer reading/commenting to it on the LJ feed, that I'm seriously considering ditching the MT install, embedding an LJ account, and washing my hands of trying to get the damn spam filters tuned right. Say what you will about LJ, nobody can deny that they're the top hosted service on the internets for anti-spam; I'm still kind of proud of that.
Anybody out there not particularly down with that plan? (Since so many of you comment on the LJ feed, and those entries go away after two weeks, I'd really love to be able to keep those comments...) Alternate possibility is to cross-post with comments disabled here, but that's just way too much effort.
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