I have a small streak of the obsessive: Last summer I read every Sharpe book by Bernard Cornwell except the Chile one (21+?), in order, over two months in the summer. Or maybe it’s a need for immediate gratification: I sometimes like to wait until every book in a series I’ve found I like is out before I will tear through all the stories at once, especially great illustrated stories like WATCHMEN or SANDMAN. How could people wait months to find out what happens next? (Of course, I make many exceptions, including the SECRET SOCIETY GIRL series, nearly every Regency author writing today and, especially, the Harry Potters.)
This weekend I was reminded how the Internet has helped me fuel this compulsive behavior. I’m re-reading the “Company of Rogues” series by Jo Beverley, which starts with AN ARRANGED MARRIAGE. The last time I read this one, I see, was June 2003, around the time I was investigating whether to turn from writing contemporary romance to try my hand at Regency. I underlined lots of period dialogue and wrote notes all over the inside cover (including the date I read it). I have about 6 Beverley “Rogues” novels (and another 6 “Malloren” ones, unmarked b/c they’re Georgian period) on my keeper shelf, but when I went to Beverley’s author site I see another good half-dozen I’m missing. Curious, I checked my reading dates on the ones I have.
True to my habits, I’d read all six in about three months in 2003, making notes in all, starting with HAZARD and working forward and then two steps back in Rogue time. Then I jumped all the way back to the first two books in the series (in reprint editions). But then I stopped, with four or five (or more?) unread. Why?
Because those middle books weren’t available. They were either out of print in 2003 or not stocked in the six bookstores and used-book stores I frequented. (My library classified romances all together, not even stacking them alphabetically, so finding anything was a crap shoot.) So I gave up, writing the titles on an ever-growing list I kept in my pocket calendar and checking whenever I was in some new bookstore. Doesn’t that sound quaint?
Last week, when I decided to re-read the series as part of my resting-between-manuscripts, thinking-of-new-ideas, studying-the-masters, summer-of-fun festival, I scored every one of those middle books, in days. Some came via Amazon or Amazon-connected third-party used book sellers (in aggregate, the world’s biggest used-book store), some through paperbackswap.com (and as I’m planning to write in them, the library is still out). This is how I collected the Sharpe books last year, too.
But now feeding the reading passion is even easier: When I finished Scott Westerfeld’s UGLIES last month (library edition) and the library’s copies of PRETTIES were all out, I didn’t even wait a day–I ordered it from the Sony eReader store and was happily reading it a half-hour later.
I hope all my favorite authors have rights that revert to them after a book goes out of print, so if they can’t get a title reprinted they can offer it online as an e-version. They would continue to earn some money for their work, and people like me would rejoice to never miss a step in a series again.
P.S. I figured out my genre! Jo Beverley writes “intelligent historical romances,” as the blurb by Publishers Weekly puts it. That’s what I want to do, too. But does that imply that others write “unintelligent” romances?
Post a Comment