I’m considering what to do next, with the blog here.
Reading progress stalled again because I’m more than 500 pages into “IT”, by Stephen King (yay, another sidetrack!). This was unplanned and I read the book when I was in my teen (half of it, then I didn’t resist and ended up watching the TV show, and so even the book progress ended there). But I found the book so amazingly good that now I’ll have to keep going till the end, this time.
But between today and tomorrow “Fall of Light” will ship. Probably one or two weeks to arrive because I didn’t order it from local Amazon. I’m not caught up with Malazan (currently reading the last part of book 6) but I’m up to date with this actual pre-series, so I’m going to read it as I receive it.
I’m writing this down in the hope it will make me do it. The thing is, I expect Fall of Light to be VERY good (Forge of Darkness was, for me), but I have this thing that makes me delay indefinitely the stuff I know is good. The bigger the expectations, the more I’m reluctant to have that experience and exhaust it. Instead if I keep it ahead of me it keeps shining, and I don’t won’t to be over with it. It’s a mental thing, one of those compulsive illogical behaviors that keep winning. And that’s also why I keep getting sidetracked reading something else rather than finishing Malazan, it’s just that I don’t want to exhaust that experience, I want to have it ahead of me instead of behind me.
Of course I also enjoy having read a great book. It’s just an illusion that the experience is exhausted, so I keep fighting the compulsive behavior even if it ends up winning a lot of times.
By the time Fall of Light lands here I’ll probably be done with IT, but not with The Bonehunters. So I’ll read both books at the same time anyway. It’s likely I’ll go slow (though the desire to go slow with Fall of Light might make me read faster and finish quickly The Bonehunters as a side-effect), so I think I’ll write some things as I read instead of waiting to finish the book, as long I actually have something to say.
Still lots of Erikson stuff beside the main series. A new novella came out that I’ll get next month, but I still have to read the previous one (I’ve read the other four, though). Then there’s the story collection “The Devil Delivered” that I expect being also excellent and I already have, as well as “Willful Child” that I also own but that has me very skeptical. And then there’s Esslemont’s “Dancer’s Lament” that doesn’t have to wait the main series either, but that I’ll probably only read after the first of Esslemont’s more recent books, so “Return of the Crimson Guard”. Or maybe before.
Beside the Malazan stuff I want to go fairly quickly through Bakker’s series, as well continue with Janny Wurts and Glen Cook’s Instrumentalities. So all these are priorities. The TBR complete pile is way, way bigger with a crazy number of other SERIES in it (from Dune, to Donaldson’s Gap + Covenant, to Neal Stephenson, to Wolfe, Dorothy Dunnett, and more and more, to the more ‘easy’ stuff that goes from Martin to Abercrombie and Sanderson, I’m happy forever).