pre-new year's resolution

h_postmortemus and i have been hit with the streamlining bug. part of it is due to the necessity of childproofing this house, but i think a lot of it is pent up neatening pressure. between moving from gainesville to raleigh, moving into a house, the whole downstairs incident, pregnancy, small baby, etc, it seems that our house has gotten 'out of shape'. and now that i think of it, before that we were never living in apartments long enough or big enough to really get everything set up properly. hmm, perhaps we're settling down. it would be about time.

but, anyways...once upon a time i had just one bookcase. it was massive, but there was only one. i spent a summer just rereading what i had there. it was a very good collection of books because it underwent frequent purgings at the local used bookstore. i had to, i didn't have enough money to get many books without selling off the ones that weren't really good. because of this, i never had too many spare books either. but now, with the poor exchange rate and the lack of time to shelve books, the library has gotten somewhat shabby. there's not enough room for the books that need to be shelved and, until recently, there were many books on the shelves that i hadn't liked the first time. the great garage sale (net profit $1.50) helped a lot with that. but that's only half the problem. the other half is upstairs.

you see, when i buy a stack of books, i naturally start with the most appealing morsels. however, after 75-80% have been consumed, i get restless for more books, or i am ambushed by a book as i am innocently wandering through a bookstore. this has happened many times in the past oh, 5 years. and as this sifting process has occured, the quality level has decreased and the quantity has increased. enough, i am getting rid of the stack once and for all. the resolution (yes, 3 paragraphs later, i get to the point) is that i am going to read all of these books in order and get the stack gone already. this isn't going to be force feeding. some of these might be absolutely horrible or just not what i need to read. in that case, after giving it a good try, i will get rid of them. it should be interesting. did i mention that these were arranged alphabetical by author in a small bookshelf? to give myself some variation, i arranged the anthologies by editor throughout instead of stacking all of them on the end as i usually would. i'm also going to give myself the option of interweaving the next books in between series/authors because i actually prefer not to read series as one block.

this is going to be an odd collection of books. the first book is Shardik by Richard Adams. I got this when I was living in gainesville, a long long time ago. i think i had borrowed in from inlerah and returned it after not finishing it in a reasonable time. i later picked up another copy, but did not get very far in it for some reason. i think because it pales in comparison to Watership Down. i shall find out. i did a quick count - 89 unread books. i really should be ashamed of myself. new books get alphabetized with all the rest. i predict my buying patterns may be altered by where the author's name is in the alphabet. also included are some books that i have felt that i really should read, but always seem a bit to tough to tackle late at night when i'm looking for the next book to read (Gulag Archipelago, Moby Dick, and even, sorry bexfiles, Simarillion).
but wait, there's more - in order to polish my writing skills, i'm going to try to do a quick review thingy after i'm done with each book. it might be just a quick, 'this sucked, i threw it in the trash'. or maybe not, the reviews are not the highest priority.