I might not fail.

About two weeks ago, I posted about my nostalgia for the whole summer reading thingie that libraries had for kids, and how my recent rejoining of the library cult made me wish there were one for adults. And how I found one at GoodReads, sorta. It’s more like ‘in a year’, and you set your own goal, which I did. At 100.

Because 100 makes the percentages easy to figure out, y’know? Also, it seemed like a totally reasonable number to attempt. If I had a few weeks left and wasn’t quite there, I could totally fake it by going back and re-reading everything Stephen King ever wrote.

BUT! I’ve read 57 out of 100. I’m 23 books ahead of schedule. And I’ve read most of those since announcing my intention to do this right here.

I read fast.

First: there’s been minimal cheating. I redid the dates on the whole A Song of Ice and Fire series [plus the Dunk & Egg series] because they never got dated in the first place, and I actually re-read them this year.

Those of you who are somehow here, who don’t know what that is: it’s the series that Game of Thrones is based on. You know, that possibly overhyped show on HBO? The one that made thousands of fans wail last year right around episode 9…and then made a thousand OTHER fans wail because that first thousand spoiled it for them? Or possibly you know about it because you caught a whiff of the shitfit people had over Stephen King telling everyone to read the goddamn books.

The man isn’t wrong. The books have been out for a while. The series is older than some of the people driving today. It may be older than some Americans who are legally drinking today, but my math is complete shit, so I can’t actually subtract 2014 from 1996.

…then there were the two complete piles of shit by the people on GhostHunters…which you might know as a complete pile of shit, and also as the book I posted about with the retarded Don’t Bother To Choose Your Own Adventure game at the end.

Then, I met Joe Hill.

I would’ve met him earlier, but, well, I’m on the restricted list at our library. I didn’t do anything bad. Not really. I just failed to live about twenty feet thataway, which would put me inside their weird tax area that somehow does not cover the entire county. If I lived twenty feet thataway, I’d also be in the delivery area for JimmyJohns, which would render me too fat and too broke to actually get to the library, though, so…anyway, where was I? Oh, right. Restricted. I can only borrow three books at a time.

That might not sound like much of a hardship to some of you. One or two of you might know what I mean when I say, “What the fuck, are you in bed with Big Oil? Why do you want me to drive there every goddamn day just to get my book on?” Because of that limit, I had to be careful. I could really only borrow sure things–especially since I can’t just drive over there on my own [because reasons, also shut up]. Sure things, or things I absolutely needed, like borrowable references.

This completely cleared up when I remembered that, yes, there was a digi-library that functioned entirely on the intertubes. Which meant that I could just sit in my bed and borrow shit, and the little digital inter-trucks would bring it to me. And little digital inter-trucks are so much faster than big brown UPS trucks.

Those little intertrucks would get pumped full of data [in my head, they’re like oil tankers, all with their own special little warning signs for things like ‘porn’ and ‘social networking’ and whatnot], and then roll on out through the tubes to my house, where they’d unload at The Router. The Router [or, as I call it, The Monolith] obviously has very efficient little guys working in it, who can not only get that shit sent straight on to a computer that’s wired, but can somehow get it loaded onto a plane if it’s wireless.

…and then that plane crashes right into my Kindle, and it’s all very tragic and there’s fire and…no, wait. This really got away from me.

Anyway, I have a twelve book limit. And apparently limitless holds. And checkins are instant, so I went mad. I went madder when I found out that my copy of 20th Century Ghosts was actually just 20th Century Ghost…but that was enough to get me started. I read Twittering from the Circus of the Dead, Wolverton Station, and Thumbprint, then Heart Shaped Box and Horns and NOS4A2. And I enjoyed them all. His style occasionally reminded me of his father’s, and occasionally reminded me of Paroxysm.

Which I’ve also read this year, actually.

While waiting on a few holds, I decided to try a bunch of short horror anthologies, which somehow led me to Ghost Radio. Not sure how I felt about that one. And, randomly, Wicked Plants, which was nowhere near as interesting or entertaining as the writeup made it out to be.

While all this was going on, I started soliciting recommendations from my Facebook friends…which is how I increased my count by, like, sixteen books. Because I decided to just dive right into The Dresden Files. That was technically cheating, too, because the first twelve or so were contained within two eBooks. But like hell I’m not going to count each individual book.

I got pretty sick of the repetition [reintroducing people, places and things] by about halfway through the second book [my thoughts: “Oh, fuck, he’s going to do this every time, isn’t he?”], but I stuck it out. And I’m all caught up.

I also got sick of accidentally catching reviews on GoodReads. It seemed like every time I caught one, it was someone bitching about the main character being a sexist pig. No shit. Really? I think he only points that out five times every book….

I read some Neil Gaiman short story collections, and Odd and the Frost Giants.

I borrowed physical copies of two extremely crappy collections of ‘Unexplained Phenomena’ books. I really don’t know what they were doing in the adult section of the library, because they were obviously written for tweens. The day I returned them [the next day; I went back mostly to see if the holds I’d requested had shown up yet and just not been updated], I found the last Dresden book I’d been waiting on, and something by Joe Nickell. Both were devoured over the weekend.

And, for no good reason except ‘I just tripped across them’, I read the entire damned Janie Johnson series. I know, I’m not the target audience. But I honestly can’t wrap my mind around who the target audience was. Tween girls who thought the entire universe revolved around them, and who were faaaar too sophisticated for BabySitters Club? The entire thing is about a poor little rich girl who finds out she was kidnapped, and spends five books unable to decide which set of parents she really loves best of all. There isn’t even any payoff at the end. The entire last book goes between the kidnapper plotting to get her father to give her more money and the main character planning her SPECIAL DAAAAAAY wedding. The kidnapper makes it to the nursing home where nobody is, the bride gets a call, and…unless I fucking blacked out, we never find out what happened. At all.

So, fuck that series. I was mostly just using it to fill time while waiting for Terry Pratchett to stop being waitlisted [assuming I know where to start with his shit, and I’m still not sure about that] and for House of Leaves to come in.

Yeah. One of my two holds was a physical copy of House of Leaves. And no, it’s not the scariest thing evar. If you think it’s scary, then you probably don’t want to read Dionaea House, or SCP-087. Or that cheesy Godzilla NES Game creepypasta.

It took me less than 24 hours to read. And I’m sure that statement made several hundred deeply crazed fans cry out in agony, because I haven’t had time to discover all the secrets and decode everything.

You know what? I haven’t. Because, unlike you, I learned something from the Truant’s story [the book’s actually three stories in one, or so. You’ve got the outer shell of Truant, who found the manuscript. In his story, you learn about the guy who wrote the manuscript–Zampano–and then you’ve got the thing that Zampano wrote, which is a story about something called The Navidson Record. Which is a sort of found-footage movie. So you’ve got a found-footage movie, and a guy writes about it–intellectually wanks about it at times–and then you’ve got Truant finding the manuscript and writing about that. Inception wishes it was this confusing].

Obsessing about this work is bad. Truant went mad over this shit. Well, this shit and a family history of bugshittery. But he obsessed, and it went badly.

I know, that’s awfully shallow of me and don’t I want to explore the cryptography, or the fact that the first letters of the words on this page spell something, and how about those numbers that count up that start appearing that aren’t page numbers and while we’re on it symbolism and themes and NO FUCK YOU. NO. I read for fun. If I wanted to discuss themes and allusions and fucking symbolism I’d just hit myself repeatedly with House of Leaves until the urge went away because oh my god no. I read for pleasure, and I haven’t become so bored with reading that I need to add three goats, a midget, and a mechanical bull to my routine just to get that pleasure.

…and I finished up today by reading Sigler’s Infected. Which didn’t quite impress me much, but maybe he gets better at that whole writing thing in other books. The characters were mostly meh–I couldn’t even get my hate on like I could for the majority of characters in ASoIaF. And, at times, I felt a little like I was reading creepypastas again, because they all seem to have this problem where they confuse giving the reader a good creep with trying to disgust the reader Roth-style. See that Godzilla NES creepypasta I mentioned for ‘super-realistic gore’, or the Russian Sleep Experiment one for examples where they just seem to think that the next step after ‘okay, this is almost creepy’ is ‘AND THEN DEAD ALIVE LAWNMOWER SCENE AND CHEESY TARANTINO JETS OF BLOOD!’

But what the hell do I know. I just read a lot, and I don’t think I’ve ever read anything that’s actually scared me. And I’ve never really written anything, so I don’t really know about writing these things. I just know about reading them, and what I enjoy.

…and I’m apparently done writing this. Which is just one of the many examples of why I’m not exactly a writer. Or, if I were, I’d probably need an editor, because I’m just too fucking tangential.

Also, I’m kinda out of books to list. I didn’t quite cover all of them. I forgot Clive Barker’s The Thief of Always, which was technically a re-read, but I liked it as much the second time.

I’ve got more reading to do, though. I mean, I’m only at 57 out of 100, which means I have 43 books to go. I’ve got 11 eBooks on hold, five books borrowed, and twelve on my wish list. I plan on giving Terry Pratchett a try–I might ease into him while waiting by getting back to Good Omens. I’m going to try to read the Dexter books. I’m going to try Divergent, but I’m, like, patron 100 of 150 in line for one of their copies. There’s a new Dresden book coming out, possibly this month.

And Gremlin has a book coming out this year. I’ve read part of it, but it doesn’t count until it’s on GoodReads. And reading for typos is not the same.

On that subject, apparently Gremlin’s done writing for a bit. That means we can go get bread. Or things resembling bread that are digestible.

One of these days, I’m going to learn how to end a fucking post.

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