Fiction

What’s On Your Nightstand?: The UnRead

Books about zombies–so 2010. Books as zombies? I’ve got ’em! And so do you. In this installation of “What’s On Your Nightstand,” I salute “The Unread:” Those books that languish at the very bottom of our TBR piles, the ones that gather dust bunnies next to our baseboards, the tomes that we swear are essential to our existence, yet never have their spines cracked.

Each spring I convince myself that I’m going to finish Lark Rise to Candleford and How Green Was My Valley (I’ve got a weird little thing going on with nostalgia novels; hmmmm, do I smell a Genre Kryptonite coming on?). Each fall I move those two books up the stack, vowing that the year shall not end until I’ve reached their endings. I intersperse these with a six-year-old ARC (I know, sad!) in a series because I know and adore the author and don’t want to neglect it–but by the time I get to the six-year-old ARC, the author’s written a new novel…

Confession, dear readers, is good for the soul. It might even convince a few of us to resurrect an Unread Book or three.