Can’t read ‘em Hall

Today brought more proof that it is never going to be possible for me to read every book I would like to read.

I managed to refrain from borrowing any more books from the library, despite there being several trying to jump off the shelves into my hand…

I had been thinking about borrowing
Changing Places

by David Lodge,
thanks (if thanks is the right word for someone who pushes another book under my nose) to Prole Art Threat who also blogged about Pierre Bayard’s How To Talk About Books You Haven’t Read (which I still haven’t finished reading yet after being diverted by Creation). He or she was reminded of “the great parlour game ‘Humiliation’ in Changing Places [...] in which players compete to admit to the most shocking unread classic” – that sounds great fun, but the blurb put me off slightly: it sounds a bit dated; and then I remembered that I still haven’t read that other classic campus novel
The History Man

by Malcolm Bradbury
(currently sitting on a shelf to my left).
Besides, Lodge has a new novel out in a few weeks:
Deaf Sentence

and anyway I’ve never found him all that funny.
Witty, yes, but not funny.

I also refrained from borrowing
Gut Feelings

by Gerd Gigerenzer
but I have a gut feeling that I will have a read of that sometime soon…ish.

Then this evening, disaster struck. I was watching Mastermind, and one of the specialist subjects was the novels of Jasper Fforde – an author I’d only vaguely heard of before and who, I learned, is in the habit of writing books within which characters enter other books and change things. What kind of evil temptation is that to a bookaholic? It’s like finding out that someone has started selling chocolate flavoured drugs to kiddies.

Also tonight I read that two more books on my to-be-read-(possibly)-list have been shortlisted for the 2008 Arthur C. Clarke Award for Science Fiction:

The Carhullan Army

 by Sarah Hall

and

The Raw Shark Texts

by Steven Hall

Plus, just a cursory glance at the shortlist led to
The H-Bomb Girl

by Stephen Baxter
catching my interest as well.

Can’t read ‘em all though.