Last week, I talked about the physical owned-and-unread books on my bookshelf. This week, I want to talk about my virtual TBR, audio queue, and to-investigate list. I have way too many books in these piles. The following will be my top virtual priorities in 2015!
Virtual TBR:
The following are the three already-published books on my virtual TBR (aka I don’t own them).
Nekropolis by Maureen McHugh – Back in the summer of 2013, Jason read a chapter of this out loud to me and the boys, and it was fascinating. The boys ended up choosing a different book for our group read, but this has been on my virtual TBR ever since.
Lies My Girlfriend Told Me by Julie Anne Peters – I love Peters and knew immediately when I heard this book was coming out that I wanted to read it. I added it to my TBR six months before it was published. Then the publication date came and went, and I still haven’t picked it up…
Choose Your Own Autobiography by Neil Patrick Harris – This is another of those books that I learned about six months before the release date, and still haven’t picked up.
Top three from the audio queue:
I usually keep quite a few books in my audio queue (roughly a dozen, except when I get overloaded!). That’s about how many books I have right now, but some of these books have been there for a very long time, so they’re taking precedence in 2015.
All Our Yesterdays by Cristin Terrill – I actually have several audios in queue that came from SyncYA’s program this summer, but this is the oldest. They will all be priorities this year!
Ender’s Game by Orson Scott Card – I’ve put this one off, and off, and off. The author really makes me angry and so I never wanted to read any of his books, but I feel that this book is such a vital part of SF/F history that I need to read it. So I need to stop putting it off.
Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell by Susanna Clarke – I tried to read this back in 2009 and didn’t make it very far. I just wasn’t interested. This past fall, I got the audio on a whim, thinking the same would happen. Instead, I was hooked immediately. I don’t know if it’s the media change or just a change in my reading interests, but hey, I’ll take it!
Most pressing from the to-investigate pile:
My to-investigate pile is by far the largest of all my potential reading pools. There are currently 30+ published books on the list. Of course, I don’t plan to read all of them. Really, what a number this high says to me is that I need to order great handfuls of books from my library and then preview each of them. Then I can decide if I’m not interested or if I want to move them to my virtual TBR. The following list includes published books that first got my attention as far back as December 2013 and as recently as November 2014.
– The Enchanted by Rene Denfield
– Falling Kingdoms by Morgan Rhode
– My Real Children by Jo Walton
– Land of Love and Drowning by Tiphanie Yanique
– Arlington Park by Rachel Cusk
– Child of the Light by Janet Berliner
– The Tale of Murasaki by Liza Dalby
– King’s Dragon by Kate Elliott
– Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell
– The Book of Illumination by Mary Ann Winkowski
– The Tragedy of Mr. Morn by Vladimir Nabokov
– A Severed Head by Iris Murdoch
– The Signature of All Things by Elizabeth Gilbert
– The Fortune Hunter by Daisy Goodwin
I asked last week and I’ll ask again – do any of you know any of these books? Which would you recommend first?
The Zen Leaf 
I’ll be interested in your experience with Ender’s Game. Chris bought me the second book, Speaker for the Dead, many years back and so I got off my duff and read Ender’s and Speaker and was blown away by both of them. I keep meaning to go on with the series, and have several of them on my shelf, but there are always too many choices and no way to read several books at the exact same moment. 🙂
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I really hope that at the end, I can say I really dislike Ender’s Game. I just don’t want to like anything Card has ever written. But I have a feeling I will like it…ah well!
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I’ve wanted to read Ender’s Game for awhile… just curious. And the same with Cloud Atlas. I do envy your ability to listen to books though. I’m a visual person and need to READ it, otherwise, I’m listening, but my mind drifts WAY too much. haha
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I didn’t used to be able to listen to audiobooks, but I got ahold of one back in 2010 that completely changed the way I thought about them. I can only listen to some kinds, and tend to listen to ones that are more plot-based and capture my attention constantly so I don’t drift. And interestingly, it helped me to be able to read ebooks better, because my issue with ebooks was that I couldn’t easily flip back and forth like I could in a real book. Can’t do that in an audio either, so I learned to read ebooks. Though I still don’t most of the time, due to my reader being way too many years old, haha!
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Neil Patrick Harris wrote such a fun book that I plan to reread it in audio. 🙂 I am in the minority and didn’t really like Ender’s Game. I read it when my last dog died, though, so I have it because I figure it was probably a timing thing. And I love Julie Anne Peters, but she sort of fell off my radar. I must get back to reading more from her!
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I think I might reread the NPH book on audio as well, especially as I hear he narrates it himself! I just started it yesterday.
You give me hope re: Ender’s Game!
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Oh, Choose Your Own Autobiography is AMAZING. He did a fantastic job transferring it to the audio format too. Seriously, I started it and finished it all in one day. It made a very long workday so much more enjoyable.
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I’m so excited to start reading it!
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