Last week we talked about the books you liked best from 2007. So this week, what with it being a new year, and all, we’re looking forward….
What new books are you looking forward to most in 2008? Something new being published this year? Something you got as a gift for the holidays? Anything in particular that you’re planning to read in 2008 that you’re looking forward to? A classic, or maybe a best-seller from 2007 that you’re waiting to appear in paperback?
Don’t forget to leave a link to your actual response (so people don’t have to go searching for it) in the comments—or if you prefer, leave your answers in the comments themselves!
I really wasn’t all that prepared for this question. I don’t participate in reading challenges like many other book bloggers, so I haven’t had to do much advance planning for my 2008 reading, and honestly hadn’t given it much thought. However, since I have actually achieved one of my “fake” New Year’s resolutions and gotten my books catalogued online (at GoodReads), I think that planning my reading from this point on probably will be easier.
This question would have been much easier to answer in January 2007, but there won’t be any new Harry Potter books coming out this year. There are some 2007 releases that I hope will be published in paperback in 2008 so I can snap them up: Then We Came to the End by Joshua Ferris and The Yiddish Policeman’s Union by Michael Chabon come to mind. There are were also new books by two Anns, Patchett (Run) and Packer (Songs Without Words), published late in 2007 that I hope are slated for paperback release this year.
This is also a year in which I hope to come to terms with books I probably won’t read after all. My cataloguing project this week brought an embarrassing number of books that have been TBR for literally years to my attention. I’ve always harbored anxiety that I’ll run out of things to read some day, but this is ridiculous. I have given my collection a long hard look and some serious thought, and concluded that some of these books probably just won’t get their turn with me. I’ve put about three dozen in a stack to be donated to the Friends of the Library bookstore this weekend. I feel guilty for not having read them, but it’s a lesser guilt than that of having let them languish unread for so long, so letting them go is, at the same time, a release of guilt. Thanks to my catalog, I may make this “closet-cleaning” of my bookshelves a recurring task.
And as I clear my shelves, that will make room for bringing back new goodies from the bookstore, which is something I always eagerly anticipate! Hopefully, I’ll choose them a little more wisely, though, so I really will read them all eventually.
About once a year or so, I go through my TBR collection to weed out books I’m not longer interested in. It usually turns out though that there aren’t that many that end up in the not-to-be-read pile. Most I’m still interested in even years later. I don’t know if I should be happy or sad about that sometimes. It means my TBR collection isn’t shrinking any, even as I read books (because I can’t help but add more).
Literary Feline – This was a long-overdue exercise. Some of the books I’m “retiring without reading” moved from Tennessee to California with me 5.5 years ago, and at that time I’d had them for a year or two already – and there were some books in that category that didn’t get purged.
But I know what you mean about the never-shrinking TBR collection, because mine is the same way, and it’s still pretty big even after weeding! 🙂