1 month into 2024 update

I finished reading Goshawk Squadron last night. That's 3 books for 2024. Both of the books that I've read in full this year were part of my end of the year Thristbooks order. That's me following up on my plan to read books that I feel like reading rather than committing to some plan that I will struggle to actually follow. I scanned my shelves for what I thought would be a fun, easy read. I picked up The Furies of Calderon after some consideration. I bought that book before moving down here, but I've been skipping it when looking for my next book. It's kind of a thick book, and I wasn't sure I was ready to commit to something that long (and it's the first book in a series). The difference this time was my having listened to the first and most of the second books in Jim Butcher's The Dresden Files. Those are crisp, clever, and well-written books. If this one is anywhere near that league, I figured it would be a fun read that wouldn't take long despite the book's heft. 

Well, I'm almost 70 pages in after starting it this morning. It's pretty much what I expected. It's been a long time since I've read a book that I want to get back to. The Furies of Calderon fits that category. The other books I've read this year, Goshawk Squadron and 10:04, were not exactly duds, they were both excellent books that went quickly (they're also both pretty short), but The Furies of Calderon is a different kind of engrossing. It's a fast paced, action packed thriller. There is no point other than a fun read. Those have been missing from my reading life for the last couple of years. I need to keep reminding myself that I read for fun. I don't need to prove something with my reading. 

Project Status

An update on pretty much any of my various projects will be about how little progress I am making towards longer term goals. Oh well. The year is winding down so I will have a chance to revisit some of my various projects, assess what's working (and whether I want to keep doing some of these things), and get myself a new direction on one or two of these efforts. 

My marathon training has been pretty much a carbon copy of last year's cycle. I've run about the same distance, have had similar length runs, and am hitting pretty much the same pace on my runs. The one big difference is the health of my knee this Sunday 3 weeks out from the race. I screwed something up during breakfast on the equivalent Saturday last year. I did not have that issue yesterday. That means I can do a long run this week and some more medium distance runs next week. I did a short run on the Monday of last year and that was it until the marathon. The running I did manage during the marathon was inefficient and super slow. I did very little training the weeks around Christmas two years ago because I was up with family in Virginia. Hopefully training right up until the race (with the appropriate taper) will result in a better race experience. I know I won't be doing an effortless jog over the entire distance. I'm hoping for less than 6 hours. That's an average of 13 minute miles. I would be happy with that. It would be a good building point for starting the new year with a better running plan. 

I'm barely reading. I don't think I've read a single page in over a week. I don't have the energy to read before going to bed and I'm not looking for time to read in at other points during the day. I'm too distracted by games and other trivialities. I have basically zero shot at meeting most of my New Year's Resolutions, but I could read a Dickens book. I read a few pages of Oliver Twist. That's my best bet at finally checking another Dickens book off my list, but I haven't built any momentum. It's more a choice and being lazy than any actual barrier between me and getting some reading done. I need to change up how I use my time and make time for reading. I really don't like this lack of progress on reading books. Hopefully I can use my week off Christmas week to build some momentum and head into the New Year poised to get my owned book pile a little smaller. 

Books, training, odds

I finally finished another book. My reading time has shrunk to almost nothing, but I still try to read a few pages every night. I used this approach to get through 10 lbs Penalty by Dick Francis. There was a 5 Books post on his novels a month or so ago. I could remember seeing his books in the bookstore so I found one at the library and gave it a go. It was a fun book. The story moved along briskly, the writing style was pleasant, and the dialogue wasn't stilted or awkward. I liked the book enough that I went up to a local library and bought a couple of his books from the used book section for 75 cents each. I don't count these as owned books. They are basically open ended library books. I will put them in the local take one leave one box when I finish them. 

10 lbs Penalty was my 21 book of the year, but, more interestingly, it is book 799 of my Goodreads list.  Assuming I don't start reading something else, definitely not a given, Jefferson and the RIghts of Man will be book 800. This book is going very slowly. I am very much against abandoning this one as I left Jefferson in France when I stopped reading The Hemingses and he's currently in France as I'm about a third of the way through the second volume of the Dumas Malone bio. I would like to get back to the US with Jefferson in one of these chronological biographies. My wife is out of town this week so I will make it a point to read a decent chunk of the book each night. If nothing else I'm hoping to build momentum and get myself moving enough that I can make it to the end of the book. I'm not really feeling anything else I have sitting on my shelves. The most likely usurper would be the 4th Sanderson secret project book. I would like to finish that by the end of the year, but I have a couple weeks until I start feeling pressure on that one. I have the last week of the year off so I'm hoping to do some day reading during that week. A fun book like Sanderson is a perfect fit.

Marathon training plods on. Saturdays are usually for long runs, but I spent my morning taking my wife to the airport. I tried running after dropping her off last year. That was probably the worst run of the training cycle. My solution for avoiding the heat was to use the treadmill. That kept me out of the sun, but it was still blazing hot, even with a fan blowing on me. My shoes were giving me all kinds of issues and my watch got very confused by the treadmill. I got in 10 miles of a planned 18 and called it quits. My training never really recovered. I did a shorter run the next week, was at Disney World the week after that, and messed up my knee getting into our booth at dinner. I'm still amazed I was able to finish the marathon. So rather than tempting a repeat and getting off my training track, I will skip beer and go to bed kind of early tonight so I can get up and run tomorrow. My plan is for 16 miles. That gets me to the turn toward Animal Kingdom on the actual marathon course. Having that reference in mind during these long runs has helped me stay focused on making the entire distance. It's not just an abstract number. It's a physical place that I can visualize myself running through. The deeper I can get in training, the better I should do on the actual course.

My plan for the post run portion of my Sunday is to exert myself by hanging out on the couch. Sports betting is once again a part of my life so I will turn on Red Zone and spend the day taking it easy. I should replace a section of screen around my pool, but I'm typically not in great moving around status after my long runs. Maybe tomorrow will be different. I plan on getting in the pool after my run. I've been avoiding the pool while some scraps on my knee and hand heal (I tripped on the sidewalk during my Thursday run the week before Thanksgiving). I've managed to avoid adding more money to my account after my initial deposit. I've been a bit free in making bets. I found a pretty good rhythm when I was betting on college basketball games a couple of years ago. I didn't do as well when I was in Virginia last March during the conference tournaments. I was just betting favorites without really having a strategy or an approach. I have fallen into that same pattern in the first couple weeks of having the ability to bet games again. I thought I was going to have to reload my account, but I put my last $35 on a three game Premier League parlay that cashed this morning. (I usually bet conservatively to avoid big losses, but I read a tweet about Elon Musk's approach to risk and decided it was the right time to go all in.) That bet got me back over $100 so I could take a step back and reassess my approach with a fresh bank roll. I've used the public bet info in the CBS Sports app to get me out of my losing approach. I'm not looking to make a bunch of money. I just want to be able to keep making small bets to keep things interesting. 

Reading Projects Status Update

Bookshelf Zero: My owned but unread list currently stands at 169 books. I finally finished A Bend in the RIver. That's the third book I've read by VS Naipaul. I understand why he is (was?) held in high regard, but his books are not fun to read. It's nice to have read them, but the actual process of reading them is just not very much fun. Rewarding and insightful but kind of boring and tedious. I also read one of my Booker Shortlist from 2021, A Passage North. That book is brilliant. I could write an essay but I won't. I'm currently working on the second volume of Malone's Jefferson bio. I'm not zipping through it because I keep falling asleep rather than reading later in the evening. I may be able to pick up something easier and get through it more quickly in the moments that I am not dozing off, but I'm committed to getting through it. These are books I want to read. There is an ongoing effort to erase important historical periods and people. You don't have to like Thomas Jefferson, but he was a key figure in the formation of the United States. Feel free to criticize Dumas Malone's regard for his subject, but that doesn't mean what he says is false. It's like hearing about someone from a friend. The perspective is colored by feelings, but dispassionate and purely rational regard is inhuman. Rejecting all knowledge that violates the tenets of orthodoxy leftist idolatry narrows our world and shortens our perspective. That's by design. I vehemently reject that design so I engage in the subversive act of reading books about slave holding white guys written by admiring white guys. 

35 books read in 2023: Not gonna happen. I'm at 20 for the year. This is an improvement over last year's 18 books. Maybe I will figure out how I was reading 30 to 40 books a few years ago and recapture that frenetic pace, but I'm just not getting through books at that clip right now. I just looked over some of my lists from previous years. There were plenty of quick and easy reads in there, but there are a decent number of serious books sprinkled through the lists. My life just isn't built like it was in 2015 or 2016. I need to recognize this simple fact and move on. I've had so much angst over how my life doesn't fit into that mold anymore. It was great, but I'm not in that place anymore. For all that I was doing things that I felt like I should be doing, I wasn't doing anything to grow or expand my experience. I found a very safe and secure spot where I could do pleasant things and not really deal with anything very consequential. So I read lots of books but otherwise just kind of drifted along. I'm not drifting now. I would still like to read more books.

Read a Dickens work: Nope. I'm just not feeling highly wrought Victorian novels right now. 

Completing various reading lists: I've crossed a few books off of each of my 3 lists this year. A Bend in the River is a Modern LIbrary Top 100 book. That's my second of the year. The first was The Postman Always Rings Twice, which is such a short book it kind of feels like cheating to include that effort in the list. I may read another before the year is out. I've read a couple New Canon titles. Checked off a Drizzt book. I'm working through these things. They don't get any longer and I haven't added any new ones so there is progress being made. I have read enough good books that I would never have thought to pick up if not for these lists that I will continue to pursue completion. They keep me away from so much of that crap that is getting published it's worth going deeper down these rabbit holes to keep escaping from the horrors of the modern publishing enterprise.  

There are others, but those are the ones that I try to keep in the tightest focus. We'll see how the year progresses. At least I've avoided the ponderous time sucks that plagued my reading time last year. 

A Bend in the River just keeps drifting away

Erasure is why I read my way through lists of highly regarded books. I'm not a big fan of books that delve deeply into racial themes, they are usually so obvious and trite, but this one was engaging and interesting. The point of the book wasn't particularly profound or difficult to parse from the text, but I liked how the novel Erasure was really the response to what the publishing industry expects from Black authors. It was human in a way that these kinds of books so often lack. The Sell-out, another racially themed book that I've read this year, lacked that relatable human experience that was so central to Erasure. I may have to explore a bit more of Everett's work. Once I make progress on some of my other reading goals of course. 

I'm slowly plugging away at The Sea. Another excellent book, but it's surprisingly ponderous given its lack of physical heft. This was supposed to be a quick read to break in my library card before I got back to A Bend in the River. It's not a quick read. I'm past the halfway point and suitably well invested in the book to take it to the end. These kinds of departures from my plan are what slow down Bookshelf Zero. At least it won't be a later contribution to my owned book pile. I had The Sea sitting in my Thriftbooks cart but removed it last night. No need to pick this up anytime soon.

This morning's Kindle Daily Deal may have extended my hiatus from reading owned books. One of the Drizzt books is on sale. It's a few ahead of where I am in the series, but just seeing it prompted me to check the library for an ebook version of the next book for me to read in the series. My old library (which allows for 3 week check out versus the 2 weeks of my new spot) had it available so I picked it up. I have the book, The Silent Blade, on audio, but I have just been skipping that when picking out audiobooks. (I've been listening to the last of the Mistborn second age novels, The Lost Metal, after finishing an audiobook about The Predator movie.)  Drizzt books are usually pretty fun, quick reads. I read the intro of this one after checking it out just to get a feel for how I would respond to another Drizzt tale. I think I could get into it. I'm not committing to anything on that front yet. We'll see how I feel after I finish The Sea.

The best laid plans...

Of course I didn't shift right into A Bend in the River after I finished The Mind of Thomas Jefferson. My wife and I finally checked out the local library on Saturday. I had this new library card so I had to check out something. I checked out The Sea. I've had it on my radar for awhile. I've checked out the ebook but didn't read a single page. The book is short and the font is large so I figured I could give it a shot. It's a short book so taking a few days to read it wouldn't cause a huge setback. I've read enough to know that I want to finish it. I probably would have finished it by now if I hadn't also checked out an ebook from my new library. I just picked a random book from the new classics list to get a sense of the online collection's depth. The book was there, Erasure, so I checked it out. I have it for two weeks. I made the mistake of starting this one too. It's better than The Sea. It's also a short book, about 6 hours or so according to the Kindle app, so I could theoretically get it read in my two week borrowing window. 

So I have three books going on simultaneously. A Bend in the River (I have read a few pages so it's not like I've abandoned it...again), The Sea, and Erasure. I should get serious and finish Erasure this weekend (it has the shorter loan period). That will free me up to wrap up The Sea before getting back to A Bend in the River. That's my current plan, but I guess there's an argument that a better plan would be to return them both and focus on the book that I own. That would depend on the goal. Reading good books? Reading them all is the right choice. Reaching my target of reading 35 books this year? Adding two short books to the list is a good step to realizing that goal. Bookshelf Zero? Using all my reading time to get through an owned book would be the right choice. I'm into all three so I'm going with the reading good books perspective. The extra books towards my reading goal is a bonus. 

My plan is still to get to The Count of Monte Cristo after A Bend in the River. Reading these other two books kind of helps make that happen as it will be easier to dedicate the time to such a big book if I have a couple more titles in the bank.

Reading plans for July (and an effort to convince myself of taking on a bigger challenge)

So here are my (always subject to change) plans as we roll into the second half of 2023. I'm almost finished with The Mind of Thomas Jefferson. It's a book by a historian for other historians. Plenty of interesting insight into the titular subject, but the undercurrent of how academic historians talk to each other also provides interesting stimulation. I have one and a half essays left to read. I will finish that one this week. I will quickly move on to A Bend in the River. I read a bit of this one before going back to the Jefferson book. I was sufficiently engaged, I just decided to pick up the Jefferson book again. A Bend in the River is physically short but my experience with this type of book is deep enough that I no longer confuse physical dimensions with the amount of time required to get through a carefully written work of literature. That puts us somewhere in the middle of July with 14 books read. 

The third Brandon Sanderson special project book is downloaded on my phone. That will be my 15th book of the year. These haven't been particularly long or challenging reads. I should get to 15 books read (and 170 books to go) before the end of the month. With 22 weeks or so left in the year, I would need to get to a book a week clip to make it to my goal of being under 150 books to read by the end of the year. Or I could bail on that goal and pick up a hefty long read. I could go back to reading two books at a time to get through a big book while maintaining a reasonable reading pace (I did this while reading Anna Karenina), but I'm not sure that system would work in my current circumstances. I also just don't really want to do that right now. 

I spent 3 months reading The Once and Future King last year. What would be the big deal if I spent a month or two reading The Count of Monte Cristo? I wouldn't get to 150 books by the end of the year, but I would have a large book (that many people seem to really love) checked off my list. I would demonstrate to myself that I have it in me to take on these big challenges again. Take on isn't the right phrase. I have the ability to succeed in reaching a big, challenging goal. I picked up the Malazan books because I thought it would be a challenge to read through those monstrosities. I knew they would take time and a focused effort to complete. I got through all 10 of them. I was successful in reaching a well defined long term goal. 

I haven't been successful in reaching many long term goals over the last few years. My energy has been dissipated into just making it through the day. My career is just kind of stumbling along. I'm doing better at applying meaningful effort, but I still have improvements to make. My marathon training, and physical fitness efforts in general, have been abysmal. I've finished the WDW Marathon twice since moving to Florida, but preparing properly is the real point of signing up for the marathon. I use the race as a framework for solid training that is aimed at making me more fit. That hasn't happened in the last two years. I've definitely run more than I would have without the race as motivation to put in long Saturday runs, but I haven't had the extended effort that is central to successful marathon training (like I know what that is). So just getting through a random assortment of short to medium length books to reach some arbitrary count at the end of the year isn't me applying a focused effort on a meaningful task. It's just going through the motions to feel like I'm doing something that I claim is meaningful to me.

The number of books I read, even the type of books that I read, isn't really the point of Bookshelf Zero. The point isn't to read the books. The point is to spend time on doing something that is meaningful. An evening spent scrolling social media on my phone or flipping through TV channels has a place in my life, but it's also important to stay focused on efforts that have a deeper and more meaningful impact on my life. I've spent 3 years watching my energy just dissipate into a nothingness morass. I've accepted any effort as evidence that I'm still engaged. I'm not looking for an edge or trying to reach new levels of performance. I've been coasting on past accomplishments. I've started to turn that tide, but real effort is going to be needed to make real progress. Getting fit, staying sharp, and staying engaged with a broader world of ideas and opinions are worthy ways to spend my time.