Books I’m Embarrassed to Have Not Read

I have been reminded that I never picked a winner for the second Suite Scarlett Giveaway from Wednesday. So here goes: Megg, from comment 22 on my website!

(In passing: Giveaways are challenging when every other commenter is like “oh, I’ve read this one” or is me or is commenting on livejournal.)

I am also giving more time to yesterday’s giveaway of Tamora Pierce’s Alanna because I only posted that at 3 p.m. yesterday. So this weekend, you can enter either the Alanna giveaway (the post below this one) or the giveaway from this post. (More to come on that.)

Leah was right in the comments section of yesterday’s post about the reason I’d likely missed out on Tamora Pierce at an actual young adult, as the Alanna quartet was originally published when I was too young to read them, and then the series became super popular while I was in college and too busy reading other stuff for much pleasure reading. (Sadly, I did almost no pleasure reading in college until my senior year, when I not only did more reading for class than I had any other year, but I also rediscovered Harry Potter and popular fiction. God bless J.K. Rowling, y’all. Seriously.)

But also, there are way too many books out there. I try to keep up as much as possible with the popular novels in YA, romance, mainstream fiction, science fiction, and of course the classics, but it’s impossible to read everything. I have dogs to walk and dinners to cook and husbands to spend quality time with and oh, yeah, a job. I haven’t even seen this week’s episode of How I Met Your Mother (which is actually the only show I currently watch on television). But I am embarrassed about all the books I haven’t read.

I am not alone in this. When you’re a writer, you have a lot of writer friends. Together, they write a lot of books. When I first joined RWA, I made a concerted effort to buy the books of all of the published writers in my RWA chapter. This didn’t last long, as I was pretty poor and they are very prolific and successful. So time goes on, and I learned that I could be proud and supportive of writers I knew who wrote in genres that weren’t exactly my cup of tea without reading their books.

But then, you get more writer friends, and they write in genres that are your favorite cups of tea, and you still can’t read them all. And then there are other writers, who are maybe not your writer friends, but are big in the genre, and you feel like you really should read them to see what is out there and selling. And people are constantly recommending books to you. And you don’t want to sound like an idiot at a cocktail party when everyone is discussing [insert big book here] and you have no idea what they are talking about.

Like the summer I didn’t read Prep, and then the next year when my book came out, everyone was asking me if it was like Prep, and I was like, um.. (But American Wife is on my TBR pile.)

I have not read anything by: Terry Pratchett, Garth Nix, or Neil Gaiman. And yes, I am a YA fantasy author. Why do you ask? (I’m actually dying to read NATION. Anyone looking for a Xmas gift for me…)

I have not read Susan Elizabeth Phillips. I read my first Nora Roberts novel in 2004, and it was an 80s category romance i picked up at a book exchange in an Australian hostel. I only read Flowers From the Storm this year. I have never read Kathleen Woodiwiss. Or J.R. Ward. Or Laurel K. Hamilton. Or Sandra Brown. I have only read one Danielle Steel.

Stephen King? Only read short stories. Lots of short stories, to be sure, but I have yet to tackle one of his novels. (Sailor Boy keeps trying to get me to read IT, but the first chapter scared me so much I had to put it down. I can apparently only handle King in bite-sized pieces.)

I have not read CATCH-22. If I am ever divorced, this fact may be one of the causes.

If you look at the list of the 1001 Books to Read Before You Die (I own a copy of this book, and have posted about it before), I have read precisely none of the books listed in the “21st century” section, though I have, in fact, read over half of the ~50 listed in the 18th century and earlier sections. I’m apparently more of a ancient classics and “rise of the novel” type girl. (Some day, we shall have to discuss how the editors believed there were 70 books one must read before death written in the 5 or 6 years of the 21st c. before this book was published, while they list fewer than 200 written in the entire 19th century.) However, of the books I have not read on that list (lots and lots), I am not embarrassed not to have read quite a few of them.

I am not alone in this. I often have conversations with writer friends where they are like, “oh, yeah, haven’t read that one, either.” And I remember one time in college, when I was discussing with one of my lit professors how the reading of one particular classic was changing my life, he got up, closed the office door, came back, leaned in, and whispered conspiratorially, “I haven’t read it.”

What books are you embarrassed to have not read?

Today’s giveaway is another book I am embarrassed to have not read: LAMENT: The Faerie Queen’s Deception, by Maggie Stiefvater. I drove three hours down and two hours back to see Maggie sign this book that I’m about to give away, as well as my copy, five hours which must have surely been plenty of time to read said book. But, alas, still on my towering TBR pile. Add it to yours by leaving a comment here.