#087

Books I Read

• The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath, a graphic novel adaptation by I. N. J. Culbard. I’ve got a few of his adaptations, and they’re all pretty great. There are a lot more he’s done which I don’t own yet, but I definitely want to.

• Neuromancer, by William Gibson. I started reading this the previous week, but finished it off this week. I liked it, I see why it captured popular culture so much. In the 1980s it must have been incredibly forward-looking. It’s still pretty forward-looking now. I’ll get the rest of the books in the trilogy at some point.

• The Fall of Icarus and A Cup of Sake Beneath the Cherry Trees, in the Penguin Little Black Classics collection. I really like these books: lots of tiny classics (or tiny excerpts of classics), published in books which cost £1 or £2 each.

• The Final Empire and The Well of Ascension, by Brandon Sanderson. These are the first purely-Sanderson books I’ve read: I’d read the Wheel of Time books he finished, but nothing else. I liked the setting and the story, he quickly built up an interesting world and an engaging plot which had me read each book in almost one sitting each. I’ve got the third book in the Mistborn trilogy on its way.

• The Book of Monelle, by Marcel Schwob. This was an influential book in the early French symbolist movement, and I can see why. It’s a collection of short stories, written as he watched the girl he loved slowly die of tuberculosis. Sometimes you can just breeze through a collection of stories, but I had to take a little break after each one to digest it. The translation I’ve got, by Kit Schluter, is very well done: it’s easy to read and, while I can’t compare with the original, it feels like it kept the emotion and the powerful writing.

• Trouble with Lichen, by John Wyndham. What happens when two biochemists discover a rare type of lichen which slows down ageing? Everything goes wrong, that’s what.

Books I Want to Have Read

I have (or had) a lot of lists of books to read: some were entries on my to-do list; many were scattered across my bookmarks; and still more were in various Amazon wishlists. And most of them I’d not reviewed since first noting them down 5+ years ago. In practice, I almost never looked at the lists, and just bought things which caught my eye. That’s not a bad way to buy books but, in that case, why not just delete the lists?

Relatedly, I had read a blog post a while ago about why you should have a reading plan, and I’d wanted to come up with one, but it felt like a daunting task.

This week I set out to tackle both problems.

First I unified all my book wishlists. Some of the lists I just deleted entirely without looking at (what are the chances I’ve lost something irreplacable? very slim), but most of them I read, and pruned books I no longer wanted, or already owned, or which I couldn’t find in print (unless it was an out-of-print book I really wanted).

This resulted in a single list of 300 or so books.

I then started to think about a reading plan. Many people read the classics, or biographies of statesmen, or histories of a certain period: these are all well-defined categories. So I felt that my reading plan should be more structured than just a list of 300 books I happened to like the sound of.

I could read the classics, that’s certainly a conventional approach, but also I don’t find it very appealing. Then it struck me. When I’m in a book shop and don’t know what to buy, I’ve found that a very safe bet is something in the SF Masterworks collection. Every book in that collection which I’ve bought, I’ve enjoyed.

So here’s my reading plan:

• The SF Masterworks collection
• The Fantasy Masterworks collection
• The Penguin Little Black Classics collection

All collections of classics, but not the classics.

And now my list of books has 535 entries. That should keep me busy for the next decade or so.