Confession of an FSF Biblioholic

One of my major problems as a reader is how many interesting books are on the shelves right now. Very often, the sentiment arises in FSF that the quality of the genre is not what it once was. I suppose I’m a lucky reader then, much of what I’ve read in the past few years has really pushed the right buttons. From the Epic Fantasies of Greg Keyes, to the near future SF of new authors like Marc Giller to the genre-bending thrill of Chris Roberson’s Paragaea to the Epic scale of Peter F. Hamilton’s space opera to the pulpy goodness of E.E. Knight’s Vampire Earth to the pure imagination of Jeffrey Ford’s fantasies to the heroic fantasy of Matt Stover to… I could go on, really. Most of the books I’ve read in the past few years have been very good, or at the leas enjoyable on some level. Of course, there are going to be clunkers, but those books help you appreciate the good books even more.

This does present a problem though. For as many books as I’ve read and enjoyed, there are as many, maybe more that I want to read. Just from this past year or so alone, I wanted to get to Abraham’s A Shadow in Summer, Hartwell’s Space Opera Renaissance, Keck’s In the Eye of Heaven, Robert Charles Wilson’s Spin, Sean Williams/Shane Dix’s Geodesica duology, John C. Wright’s Orphans of Chaos, Cory Doctrow’s Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves to Town, etc.

Add to that all the classics I want to revisit (or read for the first time, embarrassingly), like Dune, Starship Troopers, A Canticle for Leibowitz, Something Wicked This Way Comes, Ringworld, Stand on Zanzibar, 1984, Clark Ashton Smith, The Land of Laughs, Snow Crash, The Dying Earth, etc.

This doesn’t even include all the short fiction I want to read in the anthologies and magazines. I can barely trim down my own to read pile before wanting to add to it.

That was the long of it. The short of it is – there is just too much out there I want to read.