In the future, they'll be read

While I was at the book store today I was looking at a couple of books from The List, reading the back cover; checking them out basically. I had no intention of buying any of them, as A, I'm not planning on buying any of the books for now. And B, I already have ten books sitting on my desk at home from the library, that need to be read.

One I looked at was Day of the Locust, which seems quite interesting. It's about someone trying to make it in Hollywood in the 1930's. Another was The Golden Notebook, about a divorced female author, suffering through writer's block. I was intrigued by both, but for the reasons stated above, left them both on the shelf. It got me thinking however, that although I've spent a lot of time thinking about my reading order, for the most part I haven't been considering the stories I want to read, and trying to spread them out amongst all the books I don't want to read, or at least think I don't want to read.

So far, I haven't done a bad job of this, and have managed to mix in Brideshead Revisited and Tropic of Cancer with Beloved and Housekeeping. This isn't to say I enjoyed or didn't enjoy any of these books, but rather that going into some books, I'm excited, and some I am not. Probably most of that is due to either the cover, or me having heard of the book somewhere else (this was the case of Tropic of Cancer which I knew only from 'Seinfeld'). So the two books I saw today seem like two books I would like to read, but I realize that I can't be reading them for a while.

Then it struck me, that going through a list of 100 books presents one with some odd situations. When I see Never Let Me Go, the book which I have decided I will read 99th, I realize that I won't be reading it for almost three years (okay, at my current pace, over three years). It's odd to say, 'Ooh I want to read this. I shall do so in 2014.' But I suppose that's what happens when you decide to make your way through a list such as this.  And of course my current read, Infinite Jest isn't helping this problem at all.

Speaking of Infinite Jest, I've basically reached the halfway point, sitting on page 529.  Only 540 to go!  It hasn't really gripped me yet, and I've basically lost any hope that it will.  Instead, it looks as if it will be a book a slug through over one thousand pages and then never speak of it again.