My backlog is probably 500 books. That doesn’t sound too bad until you know that my current rate of reading books is about 12 books per year. What I really need is a job that’s a 2 hour commute by train (or no kids).
I did most of my reading doing the night shift at a convenience store. It was a small store, so the cleaning and other work only took about 1 - 2 hours.
Well it turns out that garbage fantasy series was actually sci-fi, but I kind of agree with you. I think its effort to out-grimdark grimdark was kind of navel-gazing, and he really did spend the last few pages of the series vomiting raw exposition onto the page, but it had some really interesting ideas, one of the best dragon battles ever committed to page, and a ton of hardcore gay sex.
My backlog is never-ending and grows all the time because all these damn authors won’t stop writing, so my technique is to just look a few books ahead. I’m currently reading:
- Record of a Spaceborn Few, by Becky Chambers – the third book in her shared-universe space novels. She manages to cram some really impressive and interesting commentary about social mores into kind of a bog-standard space-opera setting.
- The Tangled Tree, by David Quammen, which is about horizontal gene transfer. If I go too long without reading some popular science book, I start to get itchy.
- Spinning Silver, by Naomi Novik, which is the second of her folktale-inspired fantasy novels. I’m not that far into this, but so far so good. It might even be better than Uprooted.
- The Power, by Naomi Alderman, a kind of inversion of The Handmaid’s Tale
Immediate backlog:
- I’m slowly working my way through the Expanse novels, waiting to start book 3. I kind of want to time these so that I finish book 8 a month or two before the final book comes out, so I’m trying to read one every couple of months or so.
- RKM’s Thin Air (now that I know about it)
- The Monster Cormorant by Seth Dickinson, which is the sequel to one of the best fantasy novels of the last decade
- Gene Machine, a popular science book about the discovery of the ribosome.
- And I’ve been eyeing Max Gladstone’s Craft sequence books for awhile now. I’ve just recently read a couple of chapters of Three Parts Dead and intend to stuff those books in between other reading for the next few months.
I’m amused that from this entire list, I’ve read none of the books yet, including the ones I listed as “currently reading”. However, I did finish this one. Martha Well’s Murderbot series, I got through all 4 novellas. Yay! Hurray for novellas too, I have to say. I’m starting to wish this whole list was novellas.
Here’s the books I’ve added to my backlog since the original post in this thread:
Currently reading:
Blackflame (Cradle Book 3) - Will Wight
Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality - Not JK Rowling
Rereading Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone - JK Rowling
The Calculating Stars (Lady Astronaut) - Mary Robinette Kowal
Traitor Baru Cormorant - Seth Dickinson
Pawn of Prohecy - David Eddings (and 4 others in the series)
Hard Rain (Rogue) - Irma Venter
Your Perfect Year: A Novel - Charlotte Lucas
Than Who Played with Fire - Jan Stocklassa
Along the Tapajos - Fernando Vilela
The First Mrs Rothschild - Sara Aharoni
The Girl in the Tree - Sebnem Isiguzel
The Price of Paradise - Susana Lopez Rubio
Out of the Silence: After the Crash - Various
Life - Lu Yao
The Raven Tower - Ann Leckie
When Gravity Fails, A Fire in the Sun - George Alec Effinger
To Be Taught, if Fortunate - Becky Chambers
We are Legion, For We are Many, All These Worlds (Bobiverse) - Dennis Taylor
A very british history - Paul Mcauley
Redshirts - John Scalzi
Empress of Forever - Max Gladstone
Fletch - Gregory McDonald
Nevertheless She Persisted - Various
The Anubis Gates - Tim Powers
Killing Gravity - Corey White
Eye of Darkness - Sylvia Day
Along Came a Spider - James Patterson
Kiss the Girls - James Patterson
Station Eleven - Emily St John Mandel
The Good Years: From 1900 to the First World War - Walter Lord
Wild Cards I - GRRM
Down Among the Sticks and Bones - Seanan McGuire
The Mortality in Lies - Scott Gibson
The Tiger’s Daughter - K Arsenault Rivera
The Color of Magic (Discworld) - Terry Pratchett
New Spring - Robert Jordan
The Light of the Fireflies - Paul Pen
The Novels of Samuel R. Delany Volume One - Sam Delany
Complete Works of Robert Howard
Stephen Crane: The Complete Novels
Victor L Whitechurch: The Mysteries Collection
R Austin Freeman: The Complete Mysteries Collection
H C McNeile The Mysteries Collection
Wilkie Collins: the Complete Mysteries Collection
Father Brown (complete collection) - G K Chesterton
the kierkegaard collection
J S Fletcher: The Mysteries Collection
Miguel de Cervantes: The Complete Novels
Anthony Trollope: The complete Novels
Arthur Conan Doyle: The Complete Mysteries Collection
J M Barrie: The Complete Novels
Edgar Wallace: The complete Mysteries Collection
The Power of Your Subconscious mind - Joseph Murphy
The Ultimate P G Wodehouse collection
The Murder on the Links - Agatha Christie
1500 Eternal Fairy Tales - Oscar Wilde
The Necessary Beggar - Susan Palwick
The Emperor’s Blades - Brian Staveley
Cradle Books 4-6, Traveler’s Gate series, Elder Empire series - Will Wight
The Murders of Molly Southbourne - Tade Thompson
Autonomous - Annalee Newitz
The Princess Bride - William Goldman
The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
Revelation Space - Alastair Reynolds
Walkaway - Cory Doctorow
The 71/2 Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle - Stuart Turton
Tales of the Dying Earth - Jack Vance
The Collapsing Empire - John Scalzi
Witchmark - C L Polk
An Unkindness of Ghosts - Riverse Solomon
Way Station - Clifford Simak
Fire & Blood: 300 Years before Game of Thrones - GRRM
1984 - George Orwell
Don’t Panice: Douglas Adams & The Hithhiker’s guide to the galaxy - Neil Gaiman
Machineries of Empire trilogy - Yoon Ha Lee
The Armored Saint - Myke Cole
Children of Time - Adrian Tchaikovsky
The Dragonriders of Pern - Anne McCaffrey
The Fifth Season, The Obelisk Gate, The Stone Sky - N K Jemisin
The Blade Itself - Joe Abercrombie
The Only Harmless Great Thing - Brooke Bolander
The Heroes, Red Country, Best Served Cold, Last Argument of Kings, Before They are Hanged - Joe Abercrombie
The Shattered Sea Series 3-book bundle - Joe Abercrombie
Sigh.
Update, I haven’t made much of a dent. I have read the Murderbot books, the Cradle series, a few others.
Meanwhile, to my backlog, since my last post, I’ve added:
Cyroburn - Lois McMaster Bujold
The Flowers of Vashnoi - Bujold
Captain Vorpatril’s Alliance - Bujold
Harry Potter and the Cursed Child - JK Rowling
The Once and Future King - T.H. White
Mistborn Trilogy - Brandon Sanderson
Tooth and Claw - Jo Walton
The Wages of Destruction - Adam Tooze
How I Made $2,000,000 in the Stock Market - Nicolas Darvas
This is How You Lose the Time War - Amal El-Mohtar, Max Gladstone
Silver in the Wood - Emily Tesh
The Atrocity Archives (Laundry Files Book 1) Charles Stross
A History of the Pakistan Army: Wars and Insurrections - Brian Cloughley
Death Ride of the Panzers: German Armor and the Retrea… - Dennis Oliver
Riot Baby - Tochi Onyebuchi
Don Quixote - Miguel de Cervantes
The Sorcerer of the Wildeeps - Kai Ashante Wilson
Hero in a Halfling: A Humorous Fantasy Adventure - William Tyler Davis
Six Wakes - Mur Lafferty
Cold Storage - David Koepp
We, The Drowned - Carsten Jensen
Rare Earth - Kurt Allan
The Haunting of Tram Car 015 - P. Djeli Clark
The Beast Player - Nahoko Uehashi
The Color of Magic: A novel of Discworld - Terry Pratchett
The 37th Mandale - Marc Laidlaw
Kalifornia - Marc Laidlaw
The Knife of Never Letting Go (Chaos Walking Book 1) - Patrick Ness
Every Heart a Doorway - Seanan McGuire
Down Among the Sticks and Bones - Seanan McGuire
Beneath the Sugar Sky - Seanan McGuire
In an Absent Dream - Seanan McGuire
Come Tumbling Down - Seanan McGuire
War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
The Legacy Human (Singularity Series Book 1) - Susan Kaye Quinn
Stand on Zanzibar - John Brunner
The Unspoken Name - A.K. Larkwood
The Shadow of the Wind (the Cemetery of Forgotten Book 1) - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
The Silo Saga Omnibus - Wool, Shift, Dust and Sil0 Stores - Hugh Howey
Bloody Rose (The Band) - Nicholas Eames
The Craft Sequence (5-books) - Max Gladstone
Phew. Ok. That’s not as bad as last few times. I blame Tor and the ebook bargain thread.
I’ll catch up!
I rarely have more than a half dozen books in the house that I haven’t read.
I don’t have a book backlog. I do, however, have a personal library and I think my next project will be to start on the Expanse novels.