The Ever-Expanding Backlog

After being somewhat industrious last weekend, I’m spending this weekend largely resting and reading comic books. I intended on putting a dent in my backlog of unread books, but it didn’t really work out that way.

Last summer, I picked up several of the books that Marvel put out under their Timely Comics banner, which were all $3 books reprinting the first three issues of one of their then-current ongoing titles. I wasn’t reading any Marvel books at the time, and I was just getting back into buying monthly books again, after an almost ten-year break, so it seemed like a good idea to pick some of those up and see if anything caught my fancy.

Well, long story short, they mostly went into my to-be-read box and have sat there ever since. (And I’m still not buying any Marvel books on a regular basis.) I did read the Doctor Strange one some time ago, which led to me picking up some of the Jason Aaron Doctor Strange run. (I liked what I’ve read of it, but I still haven’t read all of what I bought yet.)

Yesterday, I decided that I wanted to read something that was vaguely Halloween-related, so I picked the Scarlet Witch book out of the pile. Well, that was good enough that I decided to look into picking up more of it. The series lasted for 15 issues, and has been collected into 3 volumes, all of which are on sale at Amazon for $4.50 each (for the Kindle version). So picking those up was a pretty easy decision. I just finished the third volume. For what it’s worth, I thought it was a pretty good series. (I posted reviews on Goodreads.)

The point I’m trying to get to is that I’ve read a fair number of comics this weekend, but I’m really no further into my backlog. It seems that every time I read something, it leads me down a path where I buy even more stuff.

I had been thinking about maybe reading some Locke & Key this weekend, since that seems kind of Halloween-appropriate, and I have six volumes of that to read, from a Humble Bundle I bought back in 2015. But now it’s Sunday afternoon, and it’s too late to start into something new.

And I probably shouldn’t have bought the random DC Rebirth books that I picked up at last weekend’s comic book show, since now I’m probably going to want to add at least one of those titles to my regular pull list.

But hey, having too much stuff to read is a good problem to have. I just googled “too much to read” and found this interesting short article from Carve magazine on the subject. That guy is reading Shakespeare and Melville and I’m reading comic books, but the problem is similar. (Oh, and I also have way too many programming books to read, but that’s a subject for another post entirely.) By the way, Carve magazine looks like something I’d really be interested in subscribing to, if I didn’t already have way too much to read!

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