Sometimes the most thoroughly effective trap is the one we build for ourselves. This can come from a string of bad choices and even from intelligent, well-informed ones. One of my traps is the ever-growing TBR pile. I recently did a head count of how many books I have in my house. This excludes most of the kids’ books and the graphic novels in my short boxes because frankly I was too wiped out to bother with them at the end of the day.
We have a combined total of 2,100 volumes. To most dedicated booklovers, this library is small potatoes, barely a speck in the eye of Umberto Eco who had a library of 28,000 books. To casual readers, they think I’m certifiable. As a modest estimation, I have about 300-400 books in the TBR list. It helped that I dumped about a hundred books from my collection lately. I also added some, but hopefully it won’t even out too quickly. This is part of my efforts to make room in my house because my wife is in the family way again (#5!). Instead of being in the basement bedroom, we moved the bookshelves into the basement living room and my oldest kids will move into the former library/office/mancave.
I have an obsessive personality. This makes sense since I have OCD, and I not only obsess over the things I worry about, but I also obsess over my interests and that includes books, authors, stories, movies, and characters. This also leads me to buy more books that I can handle. I only read about 360 words per minute: above average but nothing amazing. It doesn’t help that I nod off fairly often (my wife can tell you stories about this and never forgets to laugh about it). I don’t understand why I take so much upon myself when I don’t have the capacity for it.
I don’t remember who said it (maybe it was Umberto Eco), but this person said that having more books than you can read is nothing short of reaching for eternity and maybe that’s the appeal. There’s so much to explore, so many fruits of the imagination to enjoy. I am addicted to good stories that are told well. There is the feeling of thinking that something amazing is just around the corner that I haven’t read yet. This doesn’t change the fact that the library is difficult to manage.
I have a somewhat long list of books that I’ve been reading partly for fun and partly as research for a history that I’ve been writing about: Fawcett Gold Medal. It was the first publisher to consistently release paperback originals in a system that threatened to break the publishing market back in its day. In reality, I don’t know if the book will ever be completed. Granted, I have a decent knowledge of the authors who published with Gold Medal. I know about the key players and generally what led to Gold Medal’s rise and fall, and I have a good grasp on what made them special. On the other hand, I don’t have access to any correspondence, sales figures, or anything that is on the more intimate side, including papers belonging to Bill Lengel, who was a major force in directing Gold Medal’s aesthetic, which means that I could only mostly provide a high school textbook-like depth into some of the aspects of the publisher, with snatches of more intimate portraits. It would help to have more sources, but I burned myself out on this project. At this point, it would help to have a partner to shoulder some of the weight if I were to seriously consider getting back into it. It’s times like this that make me think that somebody like Ed Gorman or Bill Crider would have been better-suited to write something like this.
Other TBRs include my collection of Shadow pulp reprints and those of Captain Future, the Spider, and other characters from this era. Of course, there is still the horror pile, but to be honest I worked hard enough that I made a massive dent in it, although I have some Ramsey Campbell collections to catch up on. Adjacent to the Fawcett Gold Medal TBR section is my steadily growing pile of westerns. Some of them were published by Fawcett and others are just good books waiting to be experienced.
A part of my conundrum is that I have several interests (horror, noir, mystery, western, sword and sorcery, pulp heroes, comics, biographies, rock n’ roll history, old west history, comic history); being eclectic provides plenty of opportunities for experience, but you have to have the time for it too. This goes a long way to say that I built a trap for myself, with an obsession and love that laid its foundation. I love the atmosphere and possibilities this trap provides but am often overwhelmed by it too. As far as traps go, it could be worse.
I’ll put this trap to good use, though. I’m back on my western kick (I wasn’t off it for too long), and so you may be seeing more of them. Since this is a horror-focused blog, I’ll dip into some weird westerns that are on my list, including works by Peter Brandvold and Les Savage Jr. I’ll be re-reading The Hunger by Alma Katsu, which has a supernatural take on what happened to the Donner party. Aside from westerns, I have more topics up my sleeve, including a review of the next Jean Ray collection if the damn thing ever gets released.
On my fiction-writing end, I’m working on a weird western myself. I pitched my idea in a previous article a few months ago. Once my wife edits the work, I’ll fix it up, and I hope to commission some cover art, which I will share with the Drive-In whenever that happens. The idea is to publish the first novella I wrote for my series separately and make a few of my short stories in that series available for free. As larger projects are concerned, I have a short story collection in the works, my wife is getting parts 2 and 3 to her space opera trilogy ready for publication,along with more works in the public domain that I am fixing up and making available for purchase. This includes A Second Weird Treasury and another collection I put together that I am tentatively calling An Assembly of Werewolves, or something like that. Lots of things are happening.
This sort of update to my life is turning into the proverbial cat wailing on the fence, so I better jump off before someone throws a boot at me.
Written by Nick Montelongo
We have a combined total of 2,100 volumes. To most dedicated booklovers, this library is small potatoes, barely a speck in the eye of Umberto Eco who had a library of 28,000 books. To casual readers, they think I’m certifiable. As a modest estimation, I have about 300-400 books in the TBR list. It helped that I dumped about a hundred books from my collection lately. I also added some, but hopefully it won’t even out too quickly. This is part of my efforts to make room in my house because my wife is in the family way again (#5!). Instead of being in the basement bedroom, we moved the bookshelves into the basement living room and my oldest kids will move into the former library/office/mancave.
I have an obsessive personality. This makes sense since I have OCD, and I not only obsess over the things I worry about, but I also obsess over my interests and that includes books, authors, stories, movies, and characters. This also leads me to buy more books that I can handle. I only read about 360 words per minute: above average but nothing amazing. It doesn’t help that I nod off fairly often (my wife can tell you stories about this and never forgets to laugh about it). I don’t understand why I take so much upon myself when I don’t have the capacity for it.
I don’t remember who said it (maybe it was Umberto Eco), but this person said that having more books than you can read is nothing short of reaching for eternity and maybe that’s the appeal. There’s so much to explore, so many fruits of the imagination to enjoy. I am addicted to good stories that are told well. There is the feeling of thinking that something amazing is just around the corner that I haven’t read yet. This doesn’t change the fact that the library is difficult to manage.
I have a somewhat long list of books that I’ve been reading partly for fun and partly as research for a history that I’ve been writing about: Fawcett Gold Medal. It was the first publisher to consistently release paperback originals in a system that threatened to break the publishing market back in its day. In reality, I don’t know if the book will ever be completed. Granted, I have a decent knowledge of the authors who published with Gold Medal. I know about the key players and generally what led to Gold Medal’s rise and fall, and I have a good grasp on what made them special. On the other hand, I don’t have access to any correspondence, sales figures, or anything that is on the more intimate side, including papers belonging to Bill Lengel, who was a major force in directing Gold Medal’s aesthetic, which means that I could only mostly provide a high school textbook-like depth into some of the aspects of the publisher, with snatches of more intimate portraits. It would help to have more sources, but I burned myself out on this project. At this point, it would help to have a partner to shoulder some of the weight if I were to seriously consider getting back into it. It’s times like this that make me think that somebody like Ed Gorman or Bill Crider would have been better-suited to write something like this.
Other TBRs include my collection of Shadow pulp reprints and those of Captain Future, the Spider, and other characters from this era. Of course, there is still the horror pile, but to be honest I worked hard enough that I made a massive dent in it, although I have some Ramsey Campbell collections to catch up on. Adjacent to the Fawcett Gold Medal TBR section is my steadily growing pile of westerns. Some of them were published by Fawcett and others are just good books waiting to be experienced.
A part of my conundrum is that I have several interests (horror, noir, mystery, western, sword and sorcery, pulp heroes, comics, biographies, rock n’ roll history, old west history, comic history); being eclectic provides plenty of opportunities for experience, but you have to have the time for it too. This goes a long way to say that I built a trap for myself, with an obsession and love that laid its foundation. I love the atmosphere and possibilities this trap provides but am often overwhelmed by it too. As far as traps go, it could be worse.
I’ll put this trap to good use, though. I’m back on my western kick (I wasn’t off it for too long), and so you may be seeing more of them. Since this is a horror-focused blog, I’ll dip into some weird westerns that are on my list, including works by Peter Brandvold and Les Savage Jr. I’ll be re-reading The Hunger by Alma Katsu, which has a supernatural take on what happened to the Donner party. Aside from westerns, I have more topics up my sleeve, including a review of the next Jean Ray collection if the damn thing ever gets released.
On my fiction-writing end, I’m working on a weird western myself. I pitched my idea in a previous article a few months ago. Once my wife edits the work, I’ll fix it up, and I hope to commission some cover art, which I will share with the Drive-In whenever that happens. The idea is to publish the first novella I wrote for my series separately and make a few of my short stories in that series available for free. As larger projects are concerned, I have a short story collection in the works, my wife is getting parts 2 and 3 to her space opera trilogy ready for publication,along with more works in the public domain that I am fixing up and making available for purchase. This includes A Second Weird Treasury and another collection I put together that I am tentatively calling An Assembly of Werewolves, or something like that. Lots of things are happening.
This sort of update to my life is turning into the proverbial cat wailing on the fence, so I better jump off before someone throws a boot at me.
Written by Nick Montelongo
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