I call it “TBR Purgatory” for a reason – books come in and languish for an indeterminate amount of time before I decide their fate. If they arrive with a due date – publication or review-tour commitment – they’ll get out sooner. Some – granted, not all that many – arrive in hardcover and are still unread when the paperback hits bookstores. And occasionally, when one is finally sprung from TBRP, it taunts me and makes me regret that I kept it waiting so long. This Weekly Geeks topic wants to know about those books:
Once in a while I read a book I have had for years and I think “How the hell did I miss this one? Why did I not read this one before?”
Is there a book that has hung around your reading pile for far too long before you got to it, a book that probably got packed away until you accidentally got to it or a book that you read a few pages in and never got back to?
Oh, I have one in that last category too, although I actually got 3/4 through it before I set it aside: my famously unfinished reading of Elizabeth Kostova’s The Historian. The bookmark’s still in it, and hasn’t been moved since April of 2007.
There are currently 335 books living in TBR Purgatory. Between review commitments and the lure of the new and shiny, not too many books have been unearthed from the depths of TBRP during the last couple of years. Some have been there for five years or longer, and there’s no end to their confinement in sight.
A reading challenge rescued one of those books earlier this year. While my commitment to the Women Unbound Challenge will remain incomplete, it did get me to read Susan Jane Gilman’s 2005 memoir Hypocrite in a Pouffy White Dress, which I loved – it was definitely a “Why didn’t I read this sooner?” book.
There are other residents in TBRP that I hope will provoke that kind of response when I finally dig them out. I’ve forbidden myself to read Jonathan Franzen’s Freedom until I finally read The Corrections, which I’ve been procrastinating on since 2002. I really hope that turns out to be a “Why did I wait so long?” book.
Still, ‘tis better to have read a book late than never to have read it at all, I suppose. What book have you waited too long to read?
