A bookpile (not mine), yesterday. Photo by JocelynB on Flickr
Like Toby Lichtig in this Guardian article, I currently have a pile of books, many of which I have paid good money for, waiting to be read. At the last count, this was 43 books, but that doesn't include the copy of Wolf Hall I picked up damaged from the Little Bookshop yesterday.
The books run the gamut from brand-new hardbacks like Her Fearful Symmetry and Pretty Monsters, to classics like Tom Jones and Crime and Punishment.
One of the great hazards of working in a bookshop, if you are a booklover, is that every day you are assailed by books you want to read. I spend more time than I would like to admit considering what 3 for 2 I would like to purchase from the Big Bookshop (at the moment, Brooklyn, Beswitched and The Toymaker). And then there are books that you feel obliged to read, because you want to recommend them to customers - David Nicholls' One Day is on my pile for that reason, as is Patrick Ness' Ask and the Answer (I did read The Knife of Never Letting Go last year, and it was tremendous).
The result is that I have this huge pile of reading, and not really enough time to read it all (last year, I read 49 books, so even if I restricted myself only to books I currently own, I wouldn't be able to finish them all before the end of the year).
I can't bring myself to stop though. One restriction I have placed on myself is that I am only allowed to buy books from shops where I work. But as I spend a good thirty hours a week in bookshops, this doesn't seem likely to be the best solution!
Incidentally, I realise my book linking policy may seem a little unusual, mostly because I don't link to Amazon. What I've done is link either to the LibraryThing work page - which I like because it gives you a fair amount of info on the book, and also links to various places to buy it - or to the Guardian review, if I thought that would be more useful. Possibly eccentric, but I am trying to stop myself from books from Amazon (though DVDs and games are fine!).
