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Dec. 22nd, 2012 01:02 pmI'm emerging from Aurealis mode. Counting books, though, not reading them. I have ten books waiting for me to read. I have eight books I haven't received yet. Otherwise the novels are finished, unless someone does a last minute entry on the website tomorrow (the website is here, just in case you want to see for yourself). I hope they do, for most of the Australian-writers-publishing-outside-Oz contingent is absent this year. No Westerfeld and no Larbalestier, for instance.
I can read those 18 books in a week if I must, but I'm going to start them in a couple of days and give myself two weeks and be leisurely. By the time I finish the ones I have, maybe the others will have arrived? If everything gets here before the cut-off date then I will have read 59 new Australia YA speculative ficiton novels in a reasonably short time. If they don't, then I will have read fewer. I kinda hope that we get a few more entries, because I really like YA novels and this is the best time of year to read them. My Scroogitudiness came at the precise time I'd run out of Aurealis reading - the influx of the last books was just this week.
The reasons for the counting is because a few people have been proudly pointing to their reading statistics for the year and of those people, a couple have wondered about the statistics of other readers. The reason I don't post descriptions of what I read each day is because it would take too much time, and the reason I don't accurately count every single book I read is the same. This time I counted some of the books I'm reading, though. And I counted for my PhD, too. And I know how many review books I've read (four times the number I've written about). So I'm pretty clear that I'm still right when I say that I read between three and five hundred books in a year, most years. I enjoy most of them, too. I just don't compare numbers at all often. The count today comes because I had to work out which Aurealis books I was missing, because the deadlines for publishers are so soon and because a couple of Twitter friends talked about the number of books they read in 2012.
I read because I love it, not because of the count. This is why I want there to be a lot more YA books this year, too. 59 is a lovely number. 100 would be a better number. Imagine if Australia produced 100 good spec fic books that were classifiable as YA every single year! I wouldn't be the only happy reader.
I can read those 18 books in a week if I must, but I'm going to start them in a couple of days and give myself two weeks and be leisurely. By the time I finish the ones I have, maybe the others will have arrived? If everything gets here before the cut-off date then I will have read 59 new Australia YA speculative ficiton novels in a reasonably short time. If they don't, then I will have read fewer. I kinda hope that we get a few more entries, because I really like YA novels and this is the best time of year to read them. My Scroogitudiness came at the precise time I'd run out of Aurealis reading - the influx of the last books was just this week.
The reasons for the counting is because a few people have been proudly pointing to their reading statistics for the year and of those people, a couple have wondered about the statistics of other readers. The reason I don't post descriptions of what I read each day is because it would take too much time, and the reason I don't accurately count every single book I read is the same. This time I counted some of the books I'm reading, though. And I counted for my PhD, too. And I know how many review books I've read (four times the number I've written about). So I'm pretty clear that I'm still right when I say that I read between three and five hundred books in a year, most years. I enjoy most of them, too. I just don't compare numbers at all often. The count today comes because I had to work out which Aurealis books I was missing, because the deadlines for publishers are so soon and because a couple of Twitter friends talked about the number of books they read in 2012.
I read because I love it, not because of the count. This is why I want there to be a lot more YA books this year, too. 59 is a lovely number. 100 would be a better number. Imagine if Australia produced 100 good spec fic books that were classifiable as YA every single year! I wouldn't be the only happy reader.