Encouraged/Discouraged

When I was a teenager I would haunt bookstores and the library looking for something good. I read all the time and during the summer would read as many as two novels a day, because there was little else to do in that blistering hot, boring as hell suburb. As much of the day as possible, I would hide from the heat indoors reading whatever I could get my hands on, until my mother drove me from the house. Then I would get on my bicycle and ride it for ten or fifteen miles along the highway -- choosing by necessity to ride on the shoulder, which on the Texas Gulf Coast was a spongy mix of gravel, sand and crushed oyster shells -- to some dubious destination, usually the mall.

(The Google map shows the route going along the freeway, but I rode on the shoulder of adjacent State Hwy 3. You know what I want Google maps to do? Allow me to specify a different route -- for instance, in this case, "via Hwy. 3" instead of the freeway.) Update, July 16: Google heard me, and users like me, and now you can drag the default route to match the desired route. Here's the route I actually rode.

Then I could go through a small bookstore and have a fairly good idea of everything that was in the fiction section. I hadn't read it all, of course, but I had a notion as to whether or not I would want to.

Nowadays I got into a bookstore, even a small one, and usually I feel dismay that the selection is so large and that I will never even find all the good books, much less have time to read them all. But I buy the ones that I think I will definitely want to read some day. That's why I have dozens of books unread. Once in a while I can't remember why I thought I would be interested in reading something, and get rid of it. But I still have a lot of unread books.

Related: an article from yesterday's NYT business section on the publishing industry and how best-sellers are unpredictable.