The publisher as reader

The good weather confounds reading. You'd much rather be outside than inside.

Books pile up. Bookmarks don't move an inch.

The rule--that for every book brought into the house, one must go out--is disobeyed, though the rule that once a book is begun it must be finished has long since been abolished. 

The juggler in you drops everything; multi-tasking is a tricky dyslexic business. The Nick Adams Stories, a bio of big Charly Olson, the lit-crit psycho travelogue by Janet Malcolm on Chekhov, poetry by Maj Ragain and Chelsey Minnis, the remainder copies of Montaigne and Plutarch bought for $1 apiece that you promised yourself you'd read before you kicked the bucket and went way, way inside...

...bathetic.

And what of the lovely and unlovely manuscripts sent to you by writers, solicited and unsolicited. Neatly stacked into the possible and impossible and sitting on a table closeby, all ready for action but not just yet, not while the sun is shining.

Winter is coming and the comfort of cold weather that the reader in you loves, and the 2012 list of new titles from IF SF may be just around the corner.