Cracking the TBR Pile

I attempt to burrow through my mountains of unread books. Will I ever have space on my shelves again??

[crackingthetbrpile]

Circles & Triangles: How I (Try to) Curb Spending too Much on Books

I love finding new and exciting novels, but with over 1,000 unread sitting in my TBR pile and an always-tight budget, I’ve had to figure out ways to cut back on spending. Because my brain only cooperates when it’s sorting things, I’ve had to gameify this problem.

Here’s my current method:

I got myself a planner and next to each day I’ve drawn three circles — this is the baseline. With each book I read or remove from my collection, I cross off a circle. This incentivizes me to read and donate, since I count that as crossing off two circles.

OOO

Once I’ve crossed off all three, good news! I can now buy a book. I mark this achievement with a triangle. Now the circles reset + one extra circle for each triangle. This encourages me to work harder for each new item I want to add to my collection & makes me rethink bringing a pile of books to the register.

Ex:

ØØØ =🔺 = OOOO + 🔺

Obviously if I buy a book, that crosses off a triangle. This allows me to still buy new books or secondhand finds, but ultimately results in creating room on my shelves.

But what if I overspend?

This is where it hurts. If I buy too many books & run out of triangles, I now have to work overtime. From the time I overdraft, I have one week to make up for the difference. Usually this results in a bunch of books being added to the donate pile, since I can only read so fast. It forces me to weed rigorously.

Ex:

🔻= OOO

Am I perfect? Absolutely not. I go over fairly often. But I am way better at managing my collection (& willpower) than before creating this method. If you want to give this a try, go ahead!

[crackingthetbrpile]

Let’s try this again…

A few years ago I created this blog to make an attempt at culling my personal library. It… didn’t do much. I have still only read a little under 50% of my books, with over a thousand more to read in total. Eventually, I just gave up and let the pile grow.

But I still want room on my shelves for new books. I want to display photos and knickknacks without having to stack them. I want to know if these books are any good!

So I’m giving this another shot.

I’ll be focusing on weeding techniques, shelf organization tips, and all the fun (and baffling) books I find along the way.

It’s more about the journey, anyways.

[crackingthetbrpile]

Most people who work with books will tell you that James Patterson’s are a real pain-in-the-ass for one reason or another.

Mine is a bit… specific…

Patterson recently put out a biography on Tiger Woods, whose cover looks like:

I work at a local bookstore, and our register faces the new nonfiction section. Importantly, there’s a window behind the register that shines directly over that section, unfortunately blurring most darker colors together on the book covers.

So, the book ends up looking like:

So now I have to sit at the register, stone-faced, and help customers like I’m not being stared at by Tiger Woods’ tiger-sized wood. At least he looks absolutely stoked about it.

[phantomrose96]

People make a lot of good "thank god I'm not a kid anymore" posts about like school bullies or homework or puberty. But actually my #1 top of the "thank god I'm not a kid anymore" list is the fact that I can leave the event when I want to.

Any event I'm at! I can say "okay well I'm tired I'm going home goodbye." Could not do that shit as a kid. If you're a kid it's like yeah you will sit here at your brother's soccer game in the cold for the next 1.5 hours. You will sit here at your sibling's football practice. You will stay at this BBQ until the whole family is done with the BBQ. You are stuck at the mall until mom finds the pants she needs. You are stuck at the grocery store. No we don't know how long. You are stuck at band practice. It's running late but you're not allowed to leave. You are stuck at the party that the adults said you're leaving soon but they keep talking to these 2 people who showed up late. What the Fuck.

And that shit is on top of having homework.

[sunsbleeding]

[marthajefferson]

Anniversary of APOLLO 11 MOON LANDING

On July 20, 1969, 109 hours and 42 minutes after launch, Neil Armstrong and Edwin ‘Buzz’ Aldrin entered the lunar lander ‘Eagle’, made a final check, and the Eagle undocked from the lunar orbiter ‘Columbia’, where the third member of the crew Michael Collins, stayed in orbit around the moon. Partially manually piloted by Armstrong, the Eagle landed 0 degrees, 41 minutes, 15 seconds north moon latitude and 23 degrees, 26 minutes east moon longitude. Armstrong stepped out, and Aldrin followed 20 minutes later: human beings stepped on the moon for the first time. The two men spent 21 hours and 26 minutes on its surface. One of the astounding aspects of the mission was the seeming simplicity of the technology used to get man to the moon. According to Oliver Gassmann, professor of Technology Management, the mobile phone in your pocket has one million times more memory than the Apollo 11’s computer. Same about the procesor: the latest phones typically have more than 100,000 times the processing power of the computer that landed man on the moon 50 years ago.

“It suddenly struck me that that tiny pea, pretty and blue, was the Earth. I put up my thumb and shut one eye, and my thumb blotted out the planet Earth. I didn’t feel like a giant. I felt very, very small.” –Neil Armstrong

(gifs from the documentary Chasing The Moon, 2019)

[jumpingpuddles]

Stargate SG-1: Scorched Earth

[mylittleredgirl]

i swear i’m not gonna add this meme every time but i still had it on my desktop

[crackingthetbrpile]

I’m always so excited to receive older fanzines in the mail. Just got two spiral-bound collections from the early 2000s, but I want to save them as a treat for the weekend. It fills me with joy and anticipation, probably something close to what their original owners felt!

[crackingthetbrpile]

Paperbacks From Hell: The Twisted History of ‘70s and ‘80s Horror Fiction (Grady Hendrix, 2017)

5/5 stars

A perfect read for horror bibliophiles! Hendrix does a fantastic job breaking down the historical/political background for the various pulp horror subgenres, all with a fantastic sense of humor. It’s obvious that Hendrix both loves horror and did his research for this book — the details in the plot summaries, the author and illustrator biographies, and notes on the field’s changing landscape are all meticulous and fun to read.

My only complaint is that my TBR pile has tripled after reading this book, but that only means I’ll have some fun horror novels to page through soon!

Books left: 915

[crackingthetbrpile]

Watching SNW S1E6: God damn it, it’s fucking Devil World again!

[crackingthetbrpile]

New favorite secret Vulcan technique: melting people’s skin off with sheer brainpower

(Passage taken from The Lost Years by J. M. Dillard, 1989)

[crackingthetbrpile]

Sometimes I think it would be a good idea to make Star Trek tie-in novel video essays, if only so I could tear into Devil World on a deeper level…

This is the same interview where he admits that he didn’t really watch Star Trek and pretty much only did the novels for the paycheck. I can respect the hustle, but I can’t respect how bad he was at it.

(Quote taken from Jeff Ayer’s Voyages of Imagination, 2006)

[crackingthetbrpile]

Good lord, the middle of Fate of the Phoenix is so convoluted. You could insert the Benny Hill theme at any point in this ship chase, and it would not go amiss. We’ve literally got like 5 or 6 ships chasing after each other all in a line.

Enterprise(?) --> Doyen --> Romulan Commander & Fleet -->  Kirk, Spock, and Omne --> James --> Spock/Omne (Spomne? Omnock?)

[crackingthetbrpile]

Perhaps I will make a little fix-it fic for my boy James T. Clone!Kirk. It’s what he deserves.

[crackingthetbrpile]

The further I get into Generations, the more I realize I’m probably going to like the Shatnerverse, if only because it’ll negate all this nonsense.

[crackingthetbrpile]

Oh I get it, we have time for Chekov’s bear story, but not for the supercomputer planet maze, I see now.

This is a Gordon Eklund hate blog until I get around to The Starless World.

[crackingthetbrpile]

Devil World (Gordon Eklund, 1979)

1/5 stars (1/5 for entertainment, 0/5 for teasing me with a more interesting concept at the very end)

If you’re curious whether you should give Devil World a chance, I’ll ease your worries now: go ahead and skip this one. There’s nothing here that you can’t find done better in either another tie-in novel, or a TOS episode.

Eklund obviously wanted to try something here, but it’s just as obvious that he has no idea what he’s doing when it comes to the characters. Kirk is somehow a frightening captain, for example, despite any evidence to the contrary from The Original Series. Considering Eklund’s later comments regarding the freedom allowed to the Star Trek Adventures writers, I’m surprised this book is so unimpressive. The plot doesn’t seem to go anywhere up until the last twenty pages, but by that point Eklund had sapped all of my good will and I no longer cared.

The worst part about this novel is definitely the original characters Eklund created - namely Gilla Dupree and Albert Schang. The best I can describe Dupree is to compare her to the character of Willie Scott from Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom. She’s a songstress whose emotions change on a dime, and is really only in the way in any given scene. Somehow Kirk is in love with her after only a few days, as is the way with the more awful tie-in novels. All I can remember is writing the word “Barf” next to his first declaration of love for her. Schang is just a lazy and klutzy officer who annoyed me every time he was on the page, eventually “redeeming” himself in the least believable ending I could picture for his character.

Books left: 870

While I detested a lot of this book, I am a firm believer in that there is always a nugget of something worthwhile in these novels. I’ve included my favorite bits from Devil World beneath the “read more” for brevity’s sake.

- Eklund knows a lot about Jainism, and he’s determined to tell you all about it. Does he know a lot of accurate info about this belief system? Debatable, but I did enjoy the opportunity to learn more about it, even if I had to constantly fact-check what the characters said. Dupree sours this one, because she practices Jainism and is kind of terrible at it.

- Jacob Kell’s paintings are a fascinating bit of characterization, and I wish Eklund had done more than passively reference them. The focus on his need to hold onto the art he created after his traumatic experience speaks to the real Kell’s desires for solitude, even if this character bit is dropped by the end of the novel because Eklund got bored.

- The description of the underbelly of the Danon village. So cool, and the reveal that the entire planet is just one huge computer?! I wished that we could’ve spent the whole novel exploring the maze of hallways and wires beneath the planet’s surface, but Eklund didn’t think it deserved more than a passing mention in the last twenty pages.