The Epic Reading Quest

I am on a mission. In order to explain this mission, I have to give you a little background, which consists of two basic facts:
1) For the past two years, I've made the best effort I possibly could have made to be the biggest nerd in the world and make my (first secondary, now tertiary) education my life.
2) I love collecting books. Before Australia went and destroyed my dreams of ever working at a bookstore by somehow managing to drive two of the major booksellers and hence about 75% of the country's bookstores into closing, I could never resist walking into one and just browsing the shelves. I could seldom resist buying a book, either, if it looked interesting. And other than that, there's a certain giddy feeling I get when looking at my bookshelves, stocked with all these lovely stories, or just holding and leafing through a book, that I don't think that I can explain to someone who has never had it before.

Now, when you combine fact number 2 and fact number 1, you end up with a backlog of books that you have no time, brainspace (a finite resource, to be sure) or real desire to read. Having recently realised that there are other things in this world that may be more or equally important to good grades, I decided that it was finally time to do something about this backlog. And to do that, I have begun what I call my Epic Reading Quest.

The Epic Reading Quest is my combined effort of generally getting back into reading and of attempting to read all the books in my bookshelf that I never got around into completing, or the ones that I have bought in that two-year span in which I wasn't reading at all. The Quest consists of a list of (currently; the final list hasn't been decided on yet, and I keep on changing the order of books and adding them as I fancy) over 50 books, some of which are old friends and favourites, and some of which are less liked or completely new.

As of now, the completed items on my list include Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows (I read the rest of the books as well, but only this one made it on the list, since I had the idea when I was already partially through this book) and the Lord of the Rings trilogy, excluding The Fellowship of the Ring, for I had finished that one before I began my list. They are all old friends, but I thought that those would be the best to start with, since I know I like them -- maybe they would motivate me to continue. So far, it seems to have worked just as I had planned. Currently, I'm about half-way through The Name of the Wind by Patrick Rothfuss, and am waiting for a shipment from bookdepository.co.uk -- which is an absolutely magical site, by the way; an extremely large selection, very decent prices and free shipping to almost every corner of the world -- for its sequel, The Wise Man's Fear. Though I won't write any particularly specific book review right now, I've got to say that going from Tolkien to Rothfuss definitely wasn't much of a step down in quality. He is very, very good.

Since my list isn't complete quite yet (and it might never be), I'm not going to post it in its entirety. However, if you wish to follow my progress through this Epic Reading Quest, keep coming back to this site and watch for its tag; otherwise, find me on goodreads.com (the nick, as always, is Silbena), and I'll probably get around to posting the extensive list of what I'm going to read when I'm really, really bored or procrastinating studying for exams in a few weeks.