The Book Smugglers on Pile-o-Shame

Howdy, dear Temple Library Review’s readers! Ana and Thea from The Book Smugglers here, taking care of Harry’s place whilst he is otherwise occupied. We thought about what we were going to talk about here on this here post and decided to go with something that is always at the back of our minds:

The amount of books on our TBR piles.

Just yesterday we saying to each other that really we should be named The Book Lunatics instead of The Book Smugglers because honestly, it is just not possible to read all the books we have. We both read a lot – 3,4,5 books per week, each!, and we spend most of our waking hours reading, and still we have not make so much as a dent in our giant TBR piles (we fondly refer to them collectively as “The Blob” - for The Blob, because like the movie monster, our TBRs have a nasty habit of consuming any available space and growing uncontrollably). Possibly, this lack of dent-making is because we keep buying and receiving books when we should just say no, but alas, we have learnt that there are things one simply can not fight.

Having said that, the worst thing about The Blob is that there are books there that keeping calling to us, books that we want and need to read and still we have can’t find the time! It is MOST aggravating. It is also a reason to be ashamed. So, borrowing the idea from Aidan from A Dribble of Ink, we decided to list our Pile of Shame: those books that we KNOW we should read, that we OWN and still, we have yet to pick them up.

For example: Joe Abercrombie’s First Law Trilogy. Everybody and their mothers (and uncles and cousins and second cousins) have read these books – expect for us and we both have The Blade Itself in The Blob. Shame on us!

Or, say, Roger Zelazny’s Amber series which is a classic that Ana really wants to read and what the hell is keeping her from doing just so? Shame!

Or Naomi Novik's Temaire series that everyone raves on and on and on about? Again, both of us have His Majesty's Dragon, but we have not found the time to read it.

Or even Patrick Rothfuss's The Name of the Wind! Thea has had this book since basically it first came out. We were supposed to do a joint review for it, but Ana decided to go rogue and read it on her own (leaving Thea incredibly pissed off and hung out to dry). SHAME!

What about when Graeme from Graeme’s Fantasy Book Reviews invited us to read and review The Briar King by Greg Reyes and we did we loved it, bought book 2 and then…. Did not read it? Shame on us!

The one good thing is that there is a light at the tunnel, and if we have anything to say for ourselves is that we will persevere .We recently tackled Brandon Sanderson’s Mistborn Trilogy, for example. Ana also read The Name of the Wind by Patrick Rothfuss (to which Thea is still aggrieved) and Thea just read Ariel by Steve Boyett.

So yes, there is still hope for us. What about you? Which books do you have in your Pile o' Shame?