Bookaholic Step 4: Making an inventory

As an admitted Bookaholic, I decided to take a little inventory and post a few titles that are currently awaiting my attention on my TBR shelves. Maybe surveying the gluttony, like standing nude before a full-length mirror after a two-month couch vacation, will shame me into submission. Maybe I'm hoping I'll be able to skip back to Step 2 and believe that the Greater Power of Eyestrain will restore me to sanity.

Or maybe it will merely whet my appetite for more...

I keep finding that one book leads to another which of course begs me to investigate yet another that naturally refers to several others...I'm like a damned hunting hound on the scent of a pack of foxes.

But, just in case you're secretly wondering "which does LK have that I don't?" or "I could use a book on how to make time for writing myself," here are some of the good, the bad and the ugly from my current TBR list:

The Autobiography of Margaret Oliphant / Hester by Margaret Oliphant. Naturally, you can't read a writer's autobiography without reading some of her work. What intrigues me about Margaret Oliphant is that she suffered much but still wrote, against all odds. Born in 1828, she truly was burdened in the manner of 19th century women: nursing sick relatives, bearing six children (and losing 3 in infancy), being widowed and supporting her family with her incredibly prolific writing. The novel Hester is about an older woman who risks her own personal fortune to lead her family's banking business to safety. Will I ever get to these two books?

Twenty-eight artists and two saints by Joan Acocella. Somewhere I ran across this title and thought it would be a great addition to my Essays Month. I don't know, there's something maddeningly cool about portraits of Bob Fosse, Dorothy Parker and Mary Magdalene residing in the pages of the same book.

The Other House and The Outcry by Henry James. What can I say? NYRB had a sale. Two books by James that I'd never heard of. One a comedy of manners, one depicting uncontrollable passions lying beneath the veneer of civilized life. Tell me, truly: what would you have done?

The Fiction Editor, the Novel, and the Novelist: A Book for Writers, Teachers, Publishers, and Anyone Else Devoted to Fiction by Thomas McCormack. This guy's the CEO of St. Martin's Press. I want to write, teach and publish. Not necessarily in that order. What else is a Kitten to do to avoid writing, teaching and publishing -- but buy a book about those endeavors? To further aid in my paralysis and guilt, I have A Writer's Time: Making Time to Write (a tip of the hat to Kate from Kate's Book Blog, who always posts tantalizing quotes from tantalizing tomes).

This is just a tip of the bookish iceberg, my friends. I pass along these titles to you in hopes that you might find a gem or two to pick up yourself in time...Now, off I go to enroll in an Evelyn Wood Speed Reading course.