The Crisis Hits

The one thing that I will confess to panic buying before the lockdown was a stockpile of books. I figured that there was a good chance that deliveries of non-essential items were quite likely to be hit, and also that there was a good chance that the lockdown would last 2-3 months, so I stocked up.

However, I'm now reaching a point where I'm running short on some of my sublists. Worse, I'm now getting to a point where I'm running out of ideas for books to read at all - I have enough earmarked for the rest of this month, but thereafter I'm out of ideas. (Funnily enough, I predicted that that was likely to become a problem, and when, two years ago.)

The sublists for the year are four in number: Books from The List, New Books (which only has 10 entries), the Sharpe novels, and "Other". I have plenty of books lined up from The List and in the Sharpe series; the problems lie with the other two. New Books would have been fine, except that the virus has caused most of the novels on the list to be delayed by some months. But at time of writing, the next one is released on the 28th of the month, with one scheduled for each month thereafter. That means that I have a gap right now, but then should be okay for a while... assuming they don't get delayed again.

The "Other" sub-list is the most problematic. I need approximately fifteen books to see me through the year, and can scare up one or two for right now. Annoyingly, I can find loads of partial trilogies, but in each case either the early books have dropped out of print or the final volume has not yet been released.

The likely upshot of this is two-fold. Firstly, it is likely to mean that I'll read more books from The List than I had perhaps planned for the year. Secondly, it is quite likely that the reading goal will come to an abrupt end - many of the books from The List are hefty tomes, so expecting to read the full 60 books with so many of these to tackle isn't terribly realistic.

Unless, that is, I have some sort of inspiration...