Wednesday, March 02, 2005

Jealous?

Look at all my pretty, pretty yarn.



The green and variegated Bamboo are my "payments" for the previous test knitting (the scarf and the tank). The burgundy Oasis is for my next test knit, a lovely short sleeve sweater that you may be able to see in the picture. It's got an amazing pattern going on and should be a blast to work on.

In other news...there really isn't any. I get up, I look for a job, I help out a friend with a project, I look for a job, I eat, I read, I crochet, I sleep. It seems like there should be more going on.

I'm currently reading three books simultaneously. One is my purse book, for unexpected waits, traffic jams and eating out alone. Another is my pre-bedtime reading. Usually it's just those two going on at once (if I read during the day, I go retrieve the book from the bedside table).

The third book is the problem. You see, when I was finishing up Stephen King's Dark Tower trilogy (+4), I came across a list of all the books he's written. There are 46, not counting the screenplays. Quite a lot of books, don't ya think? And then I counted how many of those titles I had read...46. All the novels except 'Cycle of the Werewolf' that I have never been able to find plus one screenplay for 'Storm of the Century'. And then I counted how many of those book I currently have in my possession...42. And I came to the conclusion that that is just frickin' ridiculous.

I like King, don't get me wrong, but I don't consider myself obsessed by him. And yet...42 books by a single author, almost the complete works. So I decide that I was going to sell some of them off. Of course I'd keep the ones I love 'The Stand', the Dark Tower set,'Rose Madder', the ones co-written with Peter Straub, but I need to get some of these books out the door.

Except I have this problem selling books. I need to re-read them 'one last time' to make sure that I don't really want to hold onto them. So in the fall of last year I started a Stephen King binge. And I went along swimmingly, finished 5 of them. And then I hit 'It'. 'It', the first King book I ever read, when I was a freshman in college (I was a late-bloomer to the horror genre). 'It', the first book to scare the crap out of me and make it hard to sleep. 'It', my nemesis.

I think part of the problem is I though I should be scared to read a King book, after all, it was horror, wasn't it supposed to be scary? So I got myself all worked up. And certain former friends of mine fed that feeling, pumping up how scary it was, sneaking up on me when I was reading it (there's a reason they're former friends). So I was really, really scared for the length of time it took me to finish it. The next King book I read was 'Tommyknockers', which isn't scary; in fact, it's not really even good. So I got over the King immobilizing fear thing (ok, I'll admit that I sleep better if the King book on the nightstand is facedown, preferably under another book or two, with the spine facing away from me. But mostly, no fear).

So the point of all this is...the third book I'm currently reading is 'It' and I can only read it during daylight hours. So it's taking me a long time to get thru it. But I will finish it and then make the decision to sell it or not. My psychic well-being is leaning towards Sell, but my joy of reading is saying Keep, because it is a very well written book. I mean, I've read the damn thing at least 4 times (I re-read many books, not just the ones that scare me). It's alright though, the rate I'm going, it will be months before I'm done with it, plenty of time to decide.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

The way I figure it, there are only three good reasons to sell books. 1) You absolutely don't have room for them (or won't have when you buy the next bunch of books you really really want). 2) You have duplicates. Being more of a reader than a collector, I only need one copy each. 3) The book sucks so bad or I hate it so much I will definitely never read it again. (These are two different things, though both categories are small.) If it's just not for me I'll sell or donate it. If it's really that awful I might trash it. (I think I've done that once or twice, ever.) There would be good reason #4) becaue you need the money, but whenever I've sold used books I've gotten ridiculously low prices for them (like, $.25) so now I mostly donate to libraries. I do have some books that are apparently worth money, so it might be different if I were to sell them individually to a dealer instead of in a bunch to a local store.

Paula