Or, Three Things I Learned From Library Thing

I just started setting up my Library Thing library. Gosh that’s fun!

Unfortunately, my blogging platform will not allow me to put that neato set of book covers in my sidebar (grrrrr….), so I had to do it in the makeshift way you see below and to the right. But you can click on the link and check out what else I’ve read in the past 18 months of romance insanity (although I’m not finished setting it up yet).

The process of entering my reads all at once made a few details about my reading habits show up that I normally wouldn’t have noticed. For one thing, when the hell did I read all of those Sherrilyn Kenyon books? I mean, I’ve read 7. Seven! That’s more than any other author, even authors I absolutely adore like Loretta Chase and Jennifer Crusie!

For another, I am pretty fickle. I clearly have no compulsive need to start a series at the beginning or to read it straight through. Kresley Cole’s paranormals? I’ve read books 1, 3, 4 and 5. Nalini Singh’s Psy/changeling series? Books 1, 2, and 4. I’ll read the first and third books in a trilogy, and not in that order. Or, as in JR Ward’s Black Dagger Brotherhood or Diana Gabaldon’s Outlander saga, I’ll trail off in the middle of the series and never return to it.

But here’s the most surprising thing: glomming is apparently not good for my relationship with an author. I was inputting books and thinking back to how much I liked them. The first Crusie books I read were Bet Me and Welcome to Temptation and I loved both of them. But then I glommed her, and my affection for each book I read diminished slightly, until the last two (Don’t Look Down and Crazy For You) were DNFs. The same thing happened with Julia Quinn’s Bridgertons, and with Susan Elizabeth Phillips. By the time I got to SEP’s Breathing Room, I had read 4 or 5 of her other books, and I was just SEP’ed out. I have Natural Born Charmer in my TBR pile but no idea when or if I will get to it.

Why is this? Possibly it has a lot to do with the fact that I read the best books first, based on reviews and the AAR’s top 100, for example.

But I don’t think that’s all there is to it. I’ve wondered in my reviews whether it’s fair to make a great author compete against herself, and I am certainly not the only person to do that. We often say things like, “Well, [insert your favorite author here] on her bad day is better than most of them on good days.” But when I read 3 or 4 or 5 of the same author’s books in a row, I am forced to compare them to each other. Perhaps if I had stuck a book by a newer author or in a different genre in between all those Bridgertons I would have liked them all, individually, more.

I’m thinking that glomming is not good for my relationship with an author, and although sometimes the urge is irresistable, I’m going to try to pace myself from now on … for both our sakes.