Book List: An Introduction

So, I am a reader. I love to read, participate (more or less) in two real-life book groups, and usually read around 100-ish books a year. (Last year, I made it only to 92. What a slacker.)

As part of the experimentation that is this blog, I may be posting my reading list for the year here. Or there may be some bulging gaps in it -- because it is entirely possible that not everything I read is high quality literature that I would be proud for the whole wide web to know about. (I am not talking here about the books I read to the four-year-old, including that truly awful Barbie novelization from a while back; I am talking mostly about the books that I occasionally read and consider "brain candy.") Also, on principle, if one gets upset when the government talks about wanting the ability to subpoena records of what people check out of libraries, and one's librarian friends, family and acquaintances get so up in arms about this that they then start talking about how their systems are designed to make it impossible to keep such records, one has to have a smidgen of second thoughts, then, about posting everything one reads on a website.

(Some college friends of mine were once freaked out by finding a book I had left lying around about nuclear arms treaties. It was for my political science class, people.)

Other introductory thoughts: the book links are Amazon affiliate links, which means I make some small amount of money if you buy them (or anything else on Amazon) by clicking through the links on this blog. Partly this is because I may someday get around to actually setting up a page on this blog with links to things I think are particularly cool on Amazon, and partly because my theory is that this may make it easier to show/link to the book cover images from Amazon, instead of going through the pain in the patoot process of photographing book covers I own in order to provide visuals.

Do note, however, that, personally, I am cheap enough that I get most of my reading material from the public library -- and you can, too.

Which brings me to another introductory point about this list: my library has this great feature which lets you keep "lists" on your online account. I have several such "lists" of things I want to read -- and I try to only be about two years behind in getting the books on those lists read, so that I can then add a bunch of new stuff to the current year's list and not feel *entirely* overwhelmed. (Sometimes there are waiting lists of, oh, say, 500 people for a new book the year I put it on the list. If I wait a couple of years to read it, it's often a lot easier to access from the library -- and is, usually, still a good book.)

Of course, I do read books acquired from other sources, as well. Like the ones that are sitting all over my house.