How's This "Reading What You Want To Read" Thing Going?

At the beginning of the year, I posted an essay called “Shelf Awareness,” where I outlined a critical difference between “books I want to read” and “books I want to have read.”  And I vowed to only read books I was damn well excited to read.
I’ve been reading a lot more books lately, and loving more of the ones I do.  Which is awesome.
The interesting thing is how this decision has expanded my definition of “books I have little interest in reading, but will feel nobler if I manage to finish them.”  Because if you’d asked me before I started this, my “books I want to have read” would have included:

• That classic work of literature that I’d be Very Smart if I actually ever finished;
• The Very Deep author that all my friends love, but I’ve never really been able to get into;
• That well-reviewed book that’s a modernist take on faerie tales, even though I way prefer comic book mythologies to faerie tale ones and I won’t get half the references.

But since doing this, I’ve discovered that “books I want to have read, but am not actually that thrilled to read” include:

• That second book in a series, where I kinda-liked the first book that worked as a standalone, but don’t want to watch them enter Sequel Rehash territory;
• The second-tier book from an author I like, and even though everyone’s said it’s not that great I feel like I should read it anyway;
• That book I bought in a moment of weakness at a dealer’s table, and I feel like I should read it to get my $14.99 worth before I spent another $40 on books.

There were a lot of books I was reading out of obligation – because I felt, for some weird reason, that I’d read books #1 and #2, so I might as well read #3.  Or this book looked so shiny on the dealer’s shelf, but now that I’ve brought it home I should read it out of some weird penance, because dammit it’s wasted money otherwise.
And like the other “want to have read” books, reading those gave me a lot of false starts, where I’d get a third of the way through the book and drift off to another one that I sorta-wanted to finish, then get bored with that, and then there’d be a stack of books next to the tub because I didn’t want to put them back, that would be admitting failure, but I really wasn’t looking forward to picking them up either.
Now?  I order from Amazon at will (or at least as “at will” as a man with a $25-a-week entertainment budget can afford to).  I discard series wantonly.  I let my own excitement percolate, not allowing myself to value some form of “completion” over the satisfaction of having read.
I look forward to hopping in the tub and devouring a good book.  More books get thrown out, but maybe that’s the way it should have always been.

My West Coast Book Release Party: Borderlands Books, on October 11th!

Heya, folks!
If you’ve been living under a rock, you may have missed that a) I sold a novel, and b) that novel is coming out on September 30th.
But what you do not know is that I will be holding an official West Coast Release Party for Flex at Borderlands Books in San Francisco on October 11th!  I’m psyched, because the one time I went to this shop (which specializes in fantasy, sci-fi, and horror), I totally fell in love.  A love I expressed judiciously with my credit card and a bent back, staggering out of that store with an absurd load of books.  To get to do a reading/Q&A/signing there is totes exciting.
(I’ll also probably go out for drinks afterwards and invite you along, just to spend more time with y’all.  I like people.)
You may ask, “Ferrett, what about an East Coast Release Party?  Or, you know, a Cleveland one?”  And I’m still researching those.  Locally, I have some friends who need a bookstore that’s wheelchair-friendly, which rules out a surprising amount of local bookstores (as it wouldn’t be a party without those friends).  And if you know of a good New York-based bookstore that’d be amenable to a weasel, let me know.
You may also ask, “Ferrett, what about a Florida Release Party, or a Southern Release Party, or a European one?”  And the answer is that “Ferrett has a limited amount of vacation time, and family to visit on both coasts.  These Release Parties are tremendously exciting but also a net loss in cash, as there’s no way I’ll sell enough books at Borderlands to fund the airplane trip to San Francisco – so alas, this is not so much ‘a book tour’ as ‘Ferrett thinks this would be fun to visit his mother and throw this in.'”  While I’d love to visit your home town, I don’t have that kinda money to burn.  Three stops is the max.
But you can still order Flex from any number of bookstores in advance.  Which would be nice.  Authors live or die on preorders, so if you’re not gonna attend a release party but wanna celebrate, you can do a little dance when Flex arrives on your doorstep.