Life, Writing, Weirdness

Short for To Read Queue, a holdover term from pre-web message echo days.

Once upon a time, I worked in the book industry.

For a bibliophile, this seems like a dream. Spend your days surrounded by books, helping people find the books they need, and making sure all the bookshelves made appropriate use of the alphabet.

The reality is that book retail is still retail. Outside of the customer service portion, a big piece of your job is putting books on the shelves, making sure the shelves are organized in such a way that things are easy to find, and taking books off the shelves when it’s time for them to be returned.

And people are still people. Ninety-plus percent of your customers are great, most of the rest are mildly irritating but can be guided in the right direction, and some small fraction almost certainly less than one percent are a giant pain in the ass and likely to ruin your day.

I came into things working at the no-longer-existing World’s Biggest Bookstore in downtown Toronto. In those days, aside from a lot of independent stores scattered all over the country, there were two major book chains which somehow arranged with the Competition Bureau that it would be okay for them to merge and become a market-dominating force that would have no direct competition and drive a lot of the independents out of business. Larger stores began to open, and I worked in a couple of these before moving into the office and dealing with background logistics instead.

This was generally better for my personality. I kept my employee discount, worked with numbers and spreadsheets, and began to get access to the books that the buyers regularly got free.

After more than eight years, three retail locations, three logistics positions, the company and I parted ways. Which is a nice way of saying I got fired. I’ve long since stopped holding a grudge, but there was a hostile takeover in between my second and third logistics positions and I hadn’t learned to properly ignore office politics in such a way to make an incompetent boss look good. I’d develop that skill later.

When I left the company, based on my current book consumption rate, I had somewhere between seven and ten years’ reading supply, depending on what I wound up doing next. Twenty-three years later, I’ve got that all the way down to somewhere between ten and eleven years’ reading supply.

The To Read Queue is large.

For the non-bibliophiles amongst the general population, the thing that needs to be understood is that for a bibliophile having the book is very nearly as good as reading the book. Or, to paraphrase Lemony Snicket, I’ll probably die next to a pile of books I intended to read.

Only it’s not probably, it’s certainly.

Because, even after the great purge of 2003 where I donated things I was likely to never reread to our kids’ school library or to the local public library, there were still a lot of books in the house. And I’ve never stopped accumulating more books. New, used, electronic, even audio.

The list of books I want to read only ever gets longer, never mind that I have many left to write.

Be well, everyone.