Wild Wednesday with Ryssa Edwards

It’s Wild Wednesday so I can talk about that monument to the modern day reader, the To Be Read List, or the “TBR”.

Before I got an E-Reader, my To Be Read list was pretty short. A book would catch my eye and I’d think “Yeah. . . that looks good”, but I never wrote it down anywhere. It would just sort of hang around in my head till next time I hit Barnes and Noble.

But the Nook is a dangerous thing.

I have so many sample chapters on my Nook that the little color screen at the bottom just seems to slide infinitely to the left. I can now download enough samples to fill a small library. Wait. I have downloaded enough samples to fill a small library.

It’s all too quick and easy. I press a button, it charges my credit card, and I’m reading. It barely takes five minutes. This is a good thing at three in the morning when I can’t sleep. On Sunday mornings, when I’m prowling the New York Times Best Seller list, not so good.

And speaking of my Sunday morning Sample Binge, after I get all those shiny new chapters, I feel obligated. I mean, I downloaded the free chapter. I have to read the book now, right?

Every couple months I go through and weed out the samples that I know I absolutely will not read. Not ever. Not even if every printed book on the face of the Earth went up in a poof of pages would I ever read the volumes of “Julius Caesar’s Gallic War”. But when it’s free, what’s a writer to do?

I’m not sure why we make TBR Lists. Reading a book is a slice of your life that you can’t get back. A TBR List is a way to say, “I don’t have time to read what I have, but I’ll definitely find time for this one.” I don’t know. A bit strange, isn’t it?

None of this is meant to say that I don’t love my TBR List. I love the heck out of it. I get some strange sense of accomplishment just from seeing the list of books I can’t get to yet.

Here are a couple of TBR Lists I came up with for two of my favorite characters.

Romeo: “Men are From Mars, Women Are From Venus”; “The Ultimate Rose Book”; and “The Dose Makes the Poison: A Plain-Language Guide to Toxicology”.

Luke Skywalker: “Dispatches From the Former Evil Empire”; “The Princess Diaries”; and “Cosmos” by Carl Sagan because . . . space is big

What’s on your favorite character’s TBR List?

I’m Ryssa Edwards and this has been . . . Wild Wednesday!

You can find me here on the web:

Facebook: facebook.com/RyssaEdwards

My blog: http://www.ryssaedwards.net/blog/

Preview my upcoming release, Dreaming of a Kiss, here.

Warning! *Free Read Ahead* Check out “Spinner” my contribution to GoodReads’ Hot Summer Days.