on-deck shelf update July 2012

My on-deck shelf is on top of my chest of drawers.  It has quite a few large non-fiction hardback books on the right hand side that I rarely make a dent in.  All the real activity is the paperbacks running from there to the left, where I grab the next book.  Before I left for California in April, the on-deck shelf had gotten so out of control that it was two layers deep!  This is bad and I put out a full embargo on any new book purchases until I could get it under control.  Thanks to my isolation, two-hour commute and lack of internet, I was able to work that on-deck shelf way down, eliminating that ungainly second row entirely and digging deep into the paperbacks on the main row.  I also, however, started buying books again.  What I had really been hoping for was to read so many of the paperbacks that I would be forced to get into the hardbacks, but there was just too many good finds in California and I'm just going to have to read some more awesome fiction paperbacks for a while. 

Happily, though, that whole section is almost entirely refreshed and I've got nothing but new books in the paperback section, all of which I'm pretty eager to read.  It's a nice feeling to refresh the on-deck shelf.  Sometimes there are books that you keep putting off and keep putting off and they get a kind of staleness, through no fault of their own, that impedes you from possibly ever reading them. That can put a real blockade on your on-deck shelf and you need something like a 3-month trip to California to break through it.

Here's what I'm looking at now:

I am not complaining at all.  Au contraire, I fall to my knees and offer a prayer to Librus, the god of the book, and his demigods and nymphs who have guided me so benevolently this year.  Onward!