There are too many good writers

How do you find the time to read all the ones you like?

Photo by Jessica Ruscello on Unsplash

Throughout my teens in the 1990s I bought, or was bought for my birthday or Christmas, each Stephen King paperback as it came out. My dad or Big Brother or I would get the latest Terry Pratchett, and all three of us would read it. I was busy catching up with both these authors’ back catalogues too, and discovering Douglas Adams, Arthur C Clarke, Evelyn Waugh, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Flann O’Brien and Bill Bryson. There was very little I had to do outside of school/homework/revision so I had a fair bit of reading time — I never had a part-time job¹, though I sometimes got roped into spending the day with Big Brother on my mum’s market stall or, later, in her ill-fated dress shop.

At university I met my other half, a Pratchett fan who also liked the far-fetched fiction of Robert Rankin and so Rankin was added to my ‘every new paperback’ list, meaning Christmas might bring King, Pratchett, Rankin, and maybe a missing Waugh. But although I had longer holidays I also had more demands on my time. Still no part-time job² but I did volunteer at an Oxfam bookshop for a while, and homework from a degree in theoretical physics is a tad more time-consuming than A-level homework. I had books to read for my course — I took all the philosophy of science options, which only made things worse — and then there were the irresistible books I stumbled across in the university library when I got lost on the way to the ones I was looking for.

While all this was going on I was introduced to the works of Raymond Chandler and F Scott Fitzgerald and Armistead Maupin, and unaccountably decided to re-read a few early Pratchett, looking at my list³. And I was still catching up on Evelyn Waugh and Robert Rankin, even Stephen King though I’d been chipping away at his work for years by this point. There came a point in my early twenties, when my other half and I had our first flat and were immersed in DIY and gardening, and I had discovered the enormous fantasy novels of Tad Williams, that something had to give. I did not buy, borrow or receive the latest Stephen King.

Say you always go to Filey for a fortnight in July, and through the year you slip away for odd weekends here and there: Edinburgh or Barcelona or to see your Aunty Pat in Brighton. Then for reasons of cat-sitters or work commitments or other grown-up things you can’t manage those weekends anymore. If you want to go to that place in Wales you’ve heard good things about, or revisit the town in the Lake District you have fond memories of from childhood, maybe Filey has to be skipped this year. And it’s not because you’ve gone off Filey or it’s gone downhill or you think you’re too good for a B&B at the seaside these days, it’s just because there’s so much out there to explore and so little time in which to do it.

As a writer I would love to have loyal readers, but as a reader I feel like I have to be sparing with my loyalty. I could spend the rest of this year and most of next reading the books I already own, the ones on my To Read shelf or on my Kobo app. If I then fill-in the gaps by reading the Stephen King, JB Priestley or Anthony Trollope that I haven’t got yet that’s easily another year, maybe more. So now we’re well into 2026 and I haven’t read anything on my September 2024 To Read list that I hadn’t already bought — give me another year or so to read them because I really was looking forward to them.

It’s 2027 going on 2028, and I haven’t read a book that’s caught my fancy in a charity shop or that I’ve seen reviewed in The Guardian or had recommended by a friend, for 3 years. Did I miss anything good? Any interesting new voices I would have loved, or a 1960s sci-fi novel I haven’t heard of yet but that would have been just what I was after in mid-2026 when I was having that writing slump?

I read a review of the new Tracy Chevalier novel⁴ recently and although it sounded intriguing, and Chevalier was on my ‘every new paperback’ list for a decade or so — and it has to be said, was much less prolific than either Terry Pratchett or Stephen King and thus easier to keep up with — I sighed, felt guilty, but did not add it to my To Read list.

1. I don’t think I quite realised how much I was the mollycoddled baby of the family, at the time

2. Ah, the days of full government grants and cheap beer

3. My list of books read has been kept in the same small notebook since 1993 and I’m getting close to the last page. I can’t help wondering if my reading slow-down is a weird subconscious effort to not have to start a new notebook.

4. The Glassmaker, set in Venice across several centuries.