I love reading (particularly sf) but haven’t got to do much of it lately. I used to get through three or sometimes even four books a month, but that was when I spent an hour every day on the tube, didn’t own a TV and had no small person around. Now it feels as though it takes me a couple of months just to get through a short paperback and my to-read pile is just steadily growing.

A side effect is that I can’t decide what to read. I finished a book earlier this week (Recursion, by Tony Ballantyne) and was faced with a pile containing (among others) two Eric Browns, The Fall of Tartarus and New York Dreams; Ian McDonald’s River of Gods; Jeff Vandermeer’s Veniss Underground; Cory Doctorow’s A Place so Foreign and 8 More; an HTML version of Charlie Stross’s Accelerando (download); and that old classic, Mastering C programming. I just wanted to read them all at once.

I decided upon River of Gods, as really it was at the top of the pile being the last unread christmas present (although I might not be able to resist the temptation to start Accelerando, particularly after I pick up the treeware version next month). I started RoG on Tuesday 14th, and (assuming I stick with it) I thought that it’d be interesting to record this so that I’d know just how long it took to read. It’s a bit of a brick so it might be a while, but then again I’m three chapters in and enjoying it already so maybe I’ll find the time to read a bit more.