I forgot to mention, I’m taking a little break from Jared Diamond’s The Third Chimpanzee… great book, but sometimes I stop in the middle of such books to process.
In the meantime, I’ve been tearing through Bruce Sterling’s Visionary In Residence (and catching up on the bits of Crystal Express I hadn’t read until now), and I also had a go at some of the early stories in Rudy Rucker’s collection Gnarl!. I have a couple of stories left unread in Ted Chiang’s Stories of Your Life, though I look forward to getting back to that book, and tonight, I took a tear through something very different — one of my English-language Asterix comics, Asterix in Spain. Lime’s been reading the Korean translations of Asterix at a tremendous pace — I found them in the library’s collection, and signed out a few in case she might like them… she’s now hooked on Goscinny & Uderzo, and made sure to remind me to sign out volumes 6-10 for the weekend. All of that got me a little nostalgic about my own childhood readings of Asterix, so I thought I’d indulge myself a little.
I finished entering most of the books I have (over here in Korea — I’m not counting the books in my mother’s garage, and not counting the few books that I couldn’t find in the system and will have to add manually) into the Librarything database. There’s a link down in the sidebar if you want to browse through my shelves. Don’t feel awkward… it’s one of the first things I do when I visit someone else’s home, so I’m cool with it.
My collection of books, not including things I’ve loaned out to people here in Korea, or lost through loaning, comes out to almost 600 unique volumes. The scary bit is that I’d guess I’ve only read about 150-200 of them so far. I’ve accumulated these books over the almost-five years I’ve been here, but in fact, a good number of them were either acquired recently during trips, or carried over from my mother’s house after visits. (I’d say at least 200-250, maybe more, came from Saskatoon.)
While sorting them, I also put loaned books onto a special shelf, so now I’m going to try to work through them. I have two books from my friend John Wendel (a Percy Walker book and an American history text which was loaned to me for its coverage of McCarthyism), and one book plus a DVD (a Bob Dylan documentary) from my co-worker Jim.