The Rule Of Book Purchasing

It’s a true thing, I’ve discovered.  As far as I know there is no word for it, but there should be.  

As soon as you purchase a certain number of books in a particular style or genre (or check said books out of the library), you will become bored with that style or genre.   This rule immediately precedes Tsundoku.  In fact, I believe this is the act that is the root cause of Tsundoku, which for those of you who won’t follow the simple clicky-thing, is simply the act of letting books pile up unread.    

I learned that word (Tsundoko, not “unread”) yesterday, and then decided I should make inroads in my own very real Tsundoku problem by reading some of my more recent book purchases.   Yet all of those purchases are Sci Fi and Fantasy and I gotta say that I am all magic sword and spacefleeted out.   I know that in a few weeks I’ll be in the mood for genetically engineered dragons and the orphan boys who love them and we will breeze through the screenswipes in happy accord.   But right now?  Ugh.  Even the jacket blurbs (which I still call “jacket blurbs” in spite of dust jackets being both utterly annoying and vestigial) are making me roll my eyes.   “Elanth is a world  without sunlight, and the biolumenescent Ashgari rule over it with a glowing fist of iron.  When the sly young pickpocket K’ryth discovers, quite by chance, that he has the gift for creating light at will the world will never be the same”–The Chronicles of Zippo The Elder

It’s enough to make you want to give up reading altogether.   

There is a twin malady to this as-yet-unnamed plague, and that is the wavering one does when trying to decide which of the OTHER piled-up genres you should tackle.   There are all those mysteries from back around the early fall that I acquired in a fit of rediscovery.  There are the history books that look interesting and are, mostly, if you can handle reading all about Andrew Johnson’s laundry bills.   

I get very cranky when I don’t have a book on deck–that is a truth long acknowledged.   It’s worse not even having an idea of which stack to peruse.    My library is like a waiting room at a time-traveling psychiatrist’s office.   Vikings sit shoulder to shoulder with lesbian detectives and former prime ministers.   But there’s almost too much interesting material.   I’m awash in it and therefore I’m somewhat overstuffed.   

There should be a word for that too.