I’ve been getting a bit ashamed of my reading queue.
It’s not the books that I have in the queue, mind you. It’s the fact that I haven’t been reading much at all recently. It used to be where I would voraciously read books, but as of late I haven’t been doing much, if any, reading. It’s not so much a matter of time as it is just getting around to it. I tend to read books very quickly, where I can power through a good book in a matter of a few hours. I just need to sit down and actually do so.
That’s my plan for this week, anyway. Saturday night I finally sat down and read The Hunger Games, as Jennifer and I bought tickets to see the movie this coming weekend with her parents. I rather enjoyed the book, and am now looking forward to seeing it as a result. The next book in my reading queue is The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo by Stieg Larsson; I’ve seen both the Swedish and American films, but haven’t yet read the original novel. I feel bad that I haven’t yet, and am borrowing my mother-in-law’s copy to read this week. I plan to step away from the gaming this week to do so.
As for when I’m done with those, I still have a collection of H.P. Lovecraft’s works to read, From Russia, With Love by Ian Fleming, a collection of WarCraft novels, The Shining by Stephen King, The Warlords of Nin by Stephen Lawhead, and A Game of Thrones by George R.R. Martin.
The latter two are the main entries in my pile of shame. The Warlords of Nin is the second book of Lawhead’s Dragon King cycle; I read the first book way back in 1990 or 1991 in order to entertain myself through downtimes during standardized testing in my junior year of high school. Lawhead’s Dragon King cycle is pretty hard to find, and I only just found the second book a year or so back at the Pearland Half-Price Books. One would think that I would have read it immediately, but instead it went onto my bookshelf and I hadn’t touched it since. I’ve promised myself that in the next month or so, it’ll be read to completion as part of my current reading queue.
As for A Game of Thrones… one would think I would devour it immediately given my predilection for fantasy and science fiction and the fact that a TV adaptation has been airing on HBO. However, I’ve found it fairly difficult to get through. Whereas I’d power through most books pretty quickly, I’ve found A Game of Thrones fairly rich and slow going. I’ve only made it through MAYBE a quarter to a third of the book, and I finally got to a point where I decided to let it rest. My copy is now with my mother-in-law, as I’m letting her borrow it while she’s on a business trip to San Francisco. I figure I’ll finish it when she’s done and I can put it in my queue, but for now, it’s on the backburner.
It’ll be nice to finally clear out some of my reading queue… especially considering I know there are other books Jennifer has in her book collection I want to read. As I said earlier, I plan on keeping the Xbox 360 and PC shut down while I’m at home so I can concentrate on catching up on the books in my collection. Hopefully by the end of the week, if I don’t have my queue as stated above finished, I’ll have a significant dent taken out of it. :-)