It’s not an Addiction, It’s an Occupation!

The greatest gift is a passion for reading. It is cheap, it consoles, it distracts, it excites, it gives you knowledge of the world and experience of a wide kind. It is a moral illumination.

– Elizabeth Hardwick

2010 was the year I bought more books and read more books. It was a combination of finding cheap suppliers for my addiction, wanting to read a wider variety of books, and spending less useless time online. It didn’t hurt also that gathering books began midyear and created a venue wherein reading was ‘useful’ and goal directed.  I’ve boxed some of my 2010 books. I’ve shelved and read a good number of them, but by TBR pile is still growing. Over the past month (I buy books weekly I think), I’ve bought and accumulated some books. Ten books came through the mail over the weekend, while the others I bought a week ago.

Take in the tower of books:

I keep thinking if I this is the last batch for the year

It might not be unless I control myself. Now, to give my books some justice, I’m giving you a better view:

Garth Nix and Cornelia Funke, I finally have you...

I purchased both sets from a local online bookshop.  I won’t name them one by one as you could see the titles fairly well.

From Grown Up Lit to YA Lit

Top (L to R): Yann Martel’s Beatrice and Virgil, Orhan Pamuk’s The Black Book, and Mark Haddon’s A Spot of Bother.

Below (L to R): Joyce Carol Oates’ After the Wreck, I picked Myself Up, Spread Mmy Wings, and Flew Aways, Huynh Quang Nhuong’s The Land I Lost, and  Sharon Creech’s Granny Torrelli Makes Soup.

Some of them are parts of a series I'm following...

Top (L to R): Dorothy Strachey’s Olivia, David Almond’s The Savage, Elizabeth Barret Browning’s Sonnets from the Portuguese, Trenton Stewart’s The Mysterious Benedict Society and the Prisoner’s Dilemma.

Below (L to R): Lowis Lowry’s Gossamer, Bob Ong’s Ang Mga Kaibigan ni Mama Susan, and Steig Larsson’s The Girl who Played with Fire.

I also bought Tove Jansson’s Fair Play. I’m also done reading The Savage. I anticipate that my Holiday Reading would be thick. I hope to tackle a few backlog books over the holiday. Here are some of the books on my TBR pile:

And yes, I bought most of them within the year!

With the exception of RA Salvatore, Jiang Rong, and Reading Korea, all of these books were bought in 2010 waiting to be tackled by my reading muscle.

Don’t ask me where I find the time to read. I really don’t know.  With full time graduate school, a full time marketing job, and a full time blogging life it’s a miracle I can even read. But I’m glad for books. I can’t complain about them.   My mom is building a wall to wall shelf at our home soon. I am excited and I hope then my book will find permanent residence. At the moment the books I’ve read are stored in boxes while my shelves house the TBR pile and those I’m slowing taking out of that pile.

How about you, dear reader, how much books have you bought and read this year?