Monday, November 5, 2012

Confessions of a Book Hoarder

I'm a book hoarder.  Now that doesn't mean I'm going to end up on a TLC show with my family staging an intervention for my own good.  It means I have this weird tendency in my reading habits.  The literary safety net.  My fiction security blanket.

If there is a series or an author I love - like really hardcore love - I have a pathological need to keep one book unread in reserve until the next one comes out.  I'll buy the book, but it will sit there on my shelf, comforting me with the surety that if I need an Eloisa James or a Nalini Singh or a Kristan Higgins, it's there for me in my hour of desperation.  So I'm always one behind, reading the next-to-latest release as soon as the new release hits stores.  So, for example, I can finally read Archangel's Blade because Archangel's Storm is sitting next to it on my shelf.  And just last week I finally read Third Grave Dead Ahead by Darynda Jones, because Fourth Grave had hit the shelves. The only exception to this is when it is the acknowledged last book of a series (like Mockingjay).

I know that I do this.  I know why.  And I know that it is weird.  So my question is not so much, whether anyone else out there hoards books for a rainy day, but more in the spirit of confessions, what are YOUR weird reading habits?  Spill, boys and girls!

2 comments:

Unknown said...

I have an extremely bad memory so I have a hard time with long involved series that only have a new release every five+ years. (Diana Gabaldon and George RR Martin, I'm looking at you. Brilliant jerks.)
I get hooked on a series, get jilted by a massive cliffhanger and toss the book across the room, and then vow to not touch the series until the final book comes out. But I never last. I can't wait and have to read the newest one as soon as it comes out. And in order to do that I have to reread the whole series because I've forgotten it....There's a few books out there that I've read multiple times.

Vivi Andrews said...

I'm reading the Game of Thrones series very sloooooowly, in the hopes that by the time I work my way through Dance of Dragons he'll have another one done.