To Have or to Be? - Still at 161 (library book)

I was shaken twice while reading this book. 

The first time was when Fromm says that we repress the truth. We build up all kinds of stories in our head to make life tolerable. We put those stories in place to deny the truth. Said differently, we live a lie. 

The second time was his observation that the Greek Heroic Ideal (the one who dominates and defeats his opponents, takes their stuff, and wins) has defeated the Heroic Ideal personified by Jesus, the powerless man who fights back and resists the might of an Empire. 

Striving has always been a central part of my life. I never thought to question it. I always felt justified to do whatever it took to pursue the next big opportunity. I pursued my own idea of the Heroic and told myself all kinds of stories and lies to reassure myself that I was justified in my choices and actions. I was aware of this dynamic long before I read To Have or To Be?, but the straight-forward simplicity of these two ideas were so focused and sharp and close to my own experience, they hit me right in the intellectual solar plexus. 

I'm very areligious. My wife calls me an atheist, which is factually accurate, but I'm not offended by the idea of religion or the church. The concepts and practices of Christianity just don't make me feel anything. Fromm has this idea that religion is just the animating concept. It's the fundamental thing that we pursue in our life. I long held the kind of achievement oriented, outcome focused pursuing kind of life that he calls the Having orientation. I never considered another approach, at least not up until the last couple of years.

Ambition and I are on very good terms, but my ambition has never been strong enough to burn up my identity and desire to live my life on my own terms. As much as I thought I wanted to be a big important person at work, I could never take the steps necessary to fall into the established track for progression up the corporate ladder. Well, that's not entirely true. I tried, but other people were selected over me. What is true was that I fought against and resisted that track. I actively went against my best interests when I decided to stick with my analytical role rather than switch to design. It was an early step towards doing what is best for me and my family rather than what is best for my career. 

Fromm bemoans the overwhelming presence of otherness in our lives. Our lives in modern America suburbia are not shaped by our individual wants, our community, or the people we impact and who impact us. Market forces and the needs of extensive bureaucracies color and shape what we pursue and what we think is really important. We strive to win, we strive for more. We see the fabulous life lived by everybody else and bemoan the sorry sadness of our own mundane movie. Fromm points out how this is not the only way to live. You can live in a way that emphasizes what really matters and impacts  you rather than fulfilling your socially defined role as a consumer of all things both physical, moral, and spiritual. There are plenty of writers doing their thing right now that are basically promoting the same message. Don't listen to what else is going on around you. Find your space and fill it. Let the haters hate. 

Fromm's focus is not on the individual living their life, but on social forces that shape that life. His ambition is much more grand than popular bloggers (and authors). He wants to reshape society in an effort to save mankind from itself. He loses points for some of his utopian proposals, but at least he has the guts to propose something big and audacious. 

Where do I stand?

Where do I stand indeed. A very deep and potentially profound question that I will dodge for the moment to deal with the much more mundane matter of my effort to achieve Bookshelf Zero. (The list of things I would like to achieve, beyond Book Shelf Zero, is longer than my list of books to read (not that I've actually written such a list).) Not quite where I expected. I've finished 4 books since The Redbreast. Only 1 of them (Undermajordomo Minor) is a book that I own. I ventured into Erich Fromm (two books, both from the library) and a book about emotions (How Emotions are Made, which has recast so much of the way I look at the world, my life, my relationships, basically all of humanity) while trying to wade through Ulysses. I've set Ulysses aside for the moment as I race the New Year to finish a couple of owned books.

The real race is to see if I can finish The Fifties by the end of the year. This is a book that I would probably continually skip over if I hadn't embarked on this little quest. The story of how I acquired this book is my personal archetype. Hey, that looks interesting and it's cheap! Buy it! So $1.99 or $0.99 later, I have this file sitting in the cloud provoking me every time I go through my library. It's a long book. The print version is over 800 pages. Typical reading time is over 18 hours. How many other books could I read in that same period of time? And we arrive at my constant conflict. Long books take so long. I'd rather race through something shorter than wade through these tomes. Nevertheless, I'm wading. It's not an unpleasant undertaking. The book is basically a series of mini-histories of enduring people and institutions of the 50's. Presidential politics has a big role (Truman, Eisenhower, Nixon makes an appearance as Ike's VP), but pop culture figures are given the same level of attention. Elvis and The Beat Generation get their own chapters. The rise of TV is documented, and movies get their share of attention. McDonald's, Holiday Inn, and GM are big parts of the story. I'm in the Civil Rights Era right now. The stories are told well. There isn't a grand narrative being constructed or a general theory being proposed. it's just the story of a decade.

Halberstam is doing his part to trace the roots of 60's discontent in the supposed tranquility of the 50's. He makes it very clear who was dissatisfied with the status quo and who accepted the way things were and did what they could to work within that system. As I've gotten older and broken away from the foundations of my youth, I look back and marvel at how little I questioned, challenged, or in any way took a critical look at the expectations that I inherited as a white male with above average stature who was able to get good grades. It's not that I feel guilt for being a square. It just makes me wonder why I was so eager to embrace the expectations and norms of suburbia. Twenty-five years of living have distorted my view of who I was as a teenager driving his Volvo sedan around a crappy New Mexico town and suburban DC, but I remember subordinating what I wanted and liked to submit myself to the judgement and appraisal of achievement society. This wasn't a struggle. I just passively accepted the opportunities that were presenting themselves. I was eager to build my sense of who I was from the raw material provided by conventional culture. I wanted approval and pursued with vigor and passion. I sought the agglomeration of institutional social capital to build an identity. I would have been the young engineer eager to join GM back in the 50's. Looking back at history knowing how things will turn out, the view that has accumulated around this figures and institutions, and knowing how I think about contemporary culture is an interesting lens through which to explore my own history. I look back to figure out the best way to move forward. I live a largely conventional life, but the terms of that life are not simply accepted. There is choice and purpose in the warp of my life.

The purpose of buying The Left Hand of Darkness is still clear to me a year after picking it up from B&N (a store that is doing everything in its power to forfeit my business right as I transition back into a book buying year). I wanted to get something that looked like a quick but still interesting read. Ursula K Le Guin has her share of books in the best of SF lists. I hadn't read any of her stuff. I could check out one of her more highly acclaimed novels while giving myself a little nitro boost towards reducing my books to read pile. This is a book I will finish this year. I'm just a day or two away from wrapping it up. I will read more of her work. This book is literature that's fun to read.

So I will end the year having read 25 books for sure with a good chance at 26. Four of those books were borrowed so they do nothing towards getting me closer to Book Shelf Zero. My to be read list is 160 books long at the moment. It will end up being 159 or 160 when calendars roll over to 2018. That's pretty good progress over one year (I started the year with 180 books to be read.) I would really like to get it to 158 so I can buy a book without going back up to 160. No books will be bought if buying that book will put me into a different decade. Once I'm under 160, I'm not going to get back up to that number. The same thing goes for 150, 140, 130, all the way down to 0. That's the first of my new book buying rules. No book buying if I'm sitting at XX9 (or X9 or 9). I also have to read two books to every one that I buy. This is a rule that kicks in after I buy my first book of the year. I want to be able to buy books again, but I'm not going to go crazy and undo all the work I've done this year. Two steps forward, one step back is net progress. It's slower progress, but it's still moving in the right direction. If I had that rule this year and I had bought a book for every two read, I would have reduced my to be read pile by 10.

My goals for next year will be similar to this year. Thirty sounds like the right target number. I missed it this year, but I could have made it had I skipped Ulysses. As the point of this whole endeavor is to read books like Ulysses, I'm not going to give myself grief for falling a few books short of my goal. It's not like I missed it by 20 or more. I may revive the read a Dickens work goal (did I have that one this year too? I have no idea.). I want to finish the Mistborn trilogy. (If those books were as good as the Stormlight Archives I would have finished them years ago. I'm steadily making my way through the third book in the Archives on Audible. His other stuff pales beside these books.) I would like to finally read one of the many philosophy books I own. I'm getting back to Flashman (I think that's what I'm reading after I finish these other two books that I'm reading.. while maybe working in a few pages of Ulysses here and there). I have a pretty scary pile of books to get through. I'm getting light on fun books. I don't really have to pick something to challenge myself this year. I set up plenty of challenges over the last 20 years. It's time to keep digging and seeing what all the fuss is about.

The Redbreast - 161 remain

Lifestyle bloggers seem to have a central hook that they manage to turn into enough content to write a book, set up some kind of class, and keep their blog going for however long they stay interested. I tried something like that in a different blog of mine years ago. I had this notion of The Edge. The Edge is where things get scary and uncomfortable. It was about pushing myself while working out and going into places I normally avoid in my personal life. The idea got old quickly and I stopped writing those posts. They felt forced and inauthentic. It was a reasonable idea at the time, but looking back it really just reflects my constant internal refrain that I must go beyond the comfortable and experience real pain and suffering to discover what is at my core.

So maybe there are other central ideas that I could use to build up an entire brand. It's not that I have a real desire to become some kind of online thought leader. It's just an intellectual exercise. The next best idea I have for a central message is to avoid the pattern set by others and do your own thing. The space that others already occupy is crowded. Find your own thing and succeed at that. This is not a particularly unique message, and the irony that using the idea of following your own path as a way to emulate what others have done is not lost on me. 

Formulas and following well tread paths is a popular idea. That's why telling people to believe in themselves and do their own thing is a powerful, if slightly cliched, message. This Nowegian guy Jo Nesbo has been successful following the formula of so many thriller writers before him. I was seeing these books in B&N so I decided to check one out. There is a whole series of them so this could be another list of books for me to check off if they provided enough intrigue. The book was decent enough, but I'm not going to be pursuing any more of them. The story felt very familiar despite talking place in Norway. It was a curiosity read. My curiosity is sated and I can happily leave Nesbo and Harry Hole behind (they may be good audio books though). So another book is off my to be read list. 

My Ulysses progress has slowed, but I'm still moving my bookmark. Unlike The Redbreast, nothing about Ulysses feels familiar. It's not everyday that you read a book that is basically some guys internal narrative. I'm getting the hang of the book. It takes some coaxing for me to start reading it, but once I'm in it's not a huge deal for me to read 10 pages or so. This is not rapid progress, but it's progress. I'm about a quarter through the book. Sustained effort will get me to the end before the year is out.

I spent a huge chunk of my last half day Friday of the year at the garage while my car was being inspected. I used that time to start reading Undermajordomo Minor. It's the latest novel by Patrick deWitt. I read and enjoyed The Sister Brothers. His books are short, quick but still substantial reads. He's good with dialogue and the books are humorous. I will finish this book quickly, assuming I actually spend some time reading. I've been giving a decent chunk of my reading time to a book I checked out of the library. To Have or to Be? I'm not supposed to read library books (or any book other than those I owned at the start of the year), but I picked this one up when I was checking something out for my daughter. It's a very, very interesting book. There are some pretty weighty ideas scattered throughout the book. It's surprisingly easy to read for something so scholarly. I'm intrigued but not totally taken in. The politics of the book do not sit well with me. I will still finish it. It gets me closer to 30 but does nothing for Book Shelf Zero. As those are both more about having than being, I don't think it would bother Fromm too much.

Courage (Ulysses) - my brush with the heroic

I just took a look at a project that I've been working on for years. I mean that literally. It's been years. I've shared the work in a bunch of different professional forums, but the ultimate goal is to get it out there a paper in a peer reviewed journal. I tried once with an earlier version of the project, but it was very quickly killed by the editorial board of the journal I selected. I was aiming high so it didn't come as a total surprise. I revised the paper and made it much better this time. I've gotten additional input, reworked the worded over and over again, obsessed over the figures, and whittled the paper down to the main point that I want to deliver. It's just been sitting in my computer for a year or so. I haven't had the courage to push it back into the gauntlet of peer review. I thought there was just enough hard work left that I couldn't find the time to do it. 

There isn't that much work left. I just read it and it's essentially finished. I took out one awkward section that overstates the conclusions of some data. The rest of it is solid. That one section that I edited has been the difficult transition for me over the course of this entire project. The data are clear. The primary interpretation is clear, it's that transition from describing data to interpreting data that has been hard. I need to say enough without making claims that go what the data can support. I think I'm there. Now it's time for the really hard part. Now it's time for the part that requires courage. 

Submitting a paper for peer review is scary. You're exposing yourself to a possible failure. Facing the possibility of failure requires courage. Picking up a book as imposing as Ulysses takes courage. Hard books are hard to pick up but much easier to put down. They can be very rewarding reading experiences, but they can also be dry, boring, and just plain unpleasant to read. Ulysses is not dry and boring. It's actually much more engaging and entertaining than I anticipated. It's just not an easy book to pick up at the end of the day. The Name of the Wind was easy to pick up as I was rounding into the cool down phase of my day. It was a fun romp before heading to bed. The thought of Ulysses makes me spend more time watching TV or doing something on my phone. Reading a few virtual pages of The Redbreast is an easier bite for me to chew even though that book is vastly inferior to Joyce. It's all plot and things happening and suspense. I don't need to spend time in Bloom's head. I just get to ride along with a story for twenty minutes or so. 

Choosing to take on Joyce has made another failure very likely. I've read 19 books this year. My goal was 30. At my current pace, it will take me the rest of the year to finish Ulysses. I will finish The Redbreast in the not too distant future. If I finish both of those books, I'm at 21. Finishing a book that I checked out of the library, To Have or To Be, would get me to 22 (I would still only have reduced my to be read pile by 20). I was being ambitious with 30. I knew that I had lots of less than quick reads on my shelf. I will be ok with 22 for the year if Ulysses is one of those 22 books. I've had that book for a long time. I've been putting if off until some time in the future. Just like running a marathon, I realized that some day needs to be today at some point. Making it through a book that has scared me off year after year is a bigger accomplishment than just reading some arbitrary number of books. Even if it means that Book Shelf Zero will be that much further into the future. I need to get through these scary books eventually. I might as well check one off now.

Time takers, scary books (not the Halloween kind of scary), and the existentialist threat

Reading my books was going to be my big intellectual effort for the next couple of years. I switched this blog, which I used to use to post pictures of my shirtless torso, to a new subject to give me a space to ramble on about these books to make the process of reading them more than a check the box/draw a line through the title kind of exercise. The point wasn't to merely read the books, but to watch the books impact me and see how much all this reading changed me (if at all). Reading is a great way to spend time, but this blog was a challenge to see if I could make more of that experience. It hasn't really been that, and that makes me a little sad. I've read some very powerful books this year, but I haven't spent this extra time with them to more fully digest and incorporate what I've read into the way I view myself, my life, my family, the world.

There are two obvious things in my life that I can point to and blame for my failure to reflect. The release of Zelda: Breath of the Wild is a good culprit. The time that I would normally use to write posts has been given to playing that immersive, addictive, and very amazing game. When I fail to meet my 30 book target at the end of the year, Zelda will get the blame for that too. Large chunks of reading time have been given over to exploring Hyrule. I'm not proud of it, but I don't really regret it either. I've had fun playing that game. The second easy scapegoat is marathon training. It's not that marathon training takes reading time, I'm just too tired to spend much time reading. It's hard to read when you're dozing off with the book in your hand. This has been a totally unanticipated aspect of the training program. I was ready for the long runs. I wasn't ready for the fatigue. The early mornings that go with the long runs don't help much either.

Of course it's not too late for me to start writing about the books I read. I'm only 17 deep. I still have 163 on my shelves. Maybe I can start spending one night a week reflecting on what I've read after I'm finished with the marathon training (and we aren't going to baseball games every Saturday night). I could always start right now. The sad truth is I do most of my writing while I'm at work. I just haven't had the time or the desire to do this kind of writing while at work. I have slowly slid into a bit of a coast over the last couple of months. My desire to think and write hasn't been the most intense. Maybe I've been tired, maybe I've been bored, maybe I just needed to take a breather from being too cerebral and just go with the flow. Maybe I've just been too busy seeing all the way things aren't going as I would like (I'm looking at you career) rather than finding ways to keep pushing and challenging myself in ways that won't get captured on a performance review.

I haven't really thought about it in these terms until just now, but I think I've been dealing with some regrets. I have plenty of relationship regrets. Those have weighed heavy on me as I work with my wife on a few issues. I have career regrets. I'm working on making peace with the fact that the way I want to live my life and job roles that would be the easiest route to career progression do not fit well together. There will always be an element of frustration in my job when it comes to the way we do things. There's nothing I can do about it so I just have to learn to live with it. The optimism and believe that things will eventually be different that define the early phase of my career has been burned away. Finding a purpose and meaning in my work has been a challenge this year. I feel lost.

The fact that I'm writing this post is a sign that I'm emerging from this wandering phase. I've been lost in distraction more than observing and being engaged with my world. Disney World podcasts are fun, but they are really just a way for me to slip out of my current state and weakly inhabit a different type of experience. The emergence of Whiteness into my awareness has given me something more substantial to think about. The clue hunting for the landscape has also been helpful. I used those things to get out of my head. Focusing my intellectual energy on something outside of my concerns has helped me get out of that repeating loop. (Whiteness has also been the biggest threat to my book acquisition restriction. I almost got a book that would help me understand the fuss. I found a pdf for free on the internet instead. The concept is a vague and ill-defined ideology based more of perception and interpretive experience rather than anything solid and objective.)

So here I am, poised to move beyond the shallow pool I've been swimming in for the last year or so. I'm ready for a scary challenge. My first instinct was to scour my wants and desires to find a challenge that I could start to focus on as my marathon training starts to ease up and I shift into the winter (and a much anticipated trip to the best of all distractions with the best of all companions), but then I thought about my desire to read all of my books and the vehicle that challenge provides to push me beyond normal, routine, and the everyday. It's time for me to do something scary. Is there a scary challenge in my reading list?

Yes. War and Peace. Ulysses. These are the scary books that I look at every year and always seem to avoid when it comes time to pick what to read next. I'm working my way through The Name of the Wind right now. It's a big fat book that had been a bit scary before, but it's an engaging and fast moving read. I think I was braced for another Malazan type of series. The cover made me think it was another dark and complex series with scores of characters, multiple plot lines, and an elaborate world. It's pretty much the opposite of those things. Limited characters, one story line, and a world that is not all that much different from our own. It's easy to sit down and read 20 to 30 pages of this one. I always know what's going on and have no trouble keeping track of events. That's very un-Malazan like. So maybe Ulysses and War and Peace will also be more fun to read than anticipated.

My wife asked me to tell her about somebody's life and death. Not a real person, just something made up. I came up with a guy who worked for a cereal company (it was while I was eating breakfast) his whole life, was just about to retire and enjoy his life, when brain cancer came along and ended everything for him. The ending is always looming above us. It's just a question of when. There is nothing standing between me and reading Ulysses than my reluctance to pick up the book and start reading. What am I waiting for?

Remaining books, 164

I made a list of a dozen or so books that I was particularly keen on reading at some point in 2017 towards the end of 2016. Most of these books were on the longer side, 600 pages or more, so I took that into account when I made my reading goal for 2017. The real question is whether I would actually read those books. Remarkably enough, I have read a few of them. One of the first books I read this year, Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell, is on that list (with a check mark next to it now). The last three books that I've read since finishing The Reef are also on the list (with check marks). I made it through The Goldfinch. I have some thoughts on that book sitting in my drafts. I may put it out here some day. After months of reading a few pages here and there, I finally made it through The Radicalism of the American Revolution. That is a fascinating but rather dry book. It was tough to read, but I'm very happy that I put in the effort. I've also knocked off another Modern Library 100 book. I read Deliverance. It's short but rather brutal.

I picked up Tender is the Night after finishing Deliverance. It's another shorter book that also happens to be a Modern Library 100. It's a very quick and pleasant read. I'd like to get through it this week, but I may not find the time to get it wrapped up. I will definitely be finished with it by this time next week.

Looking at my list of 2017 Aspirations, I can see a couple of possibilities for what to take on next. Mistborn 3 is an attractive choice. The third book in Sanderson's Stormlight Archives is being released in November. I consume those as audiobooks so I can get it without compromising on my no new books pledge (I would have added it as an exception if I had read the print versions of the first two volumes). Wrapping up another story from the Cosmere would be a good way to build up to the new audiobook (all 50 hours of it). The Kingkiller Chronicles are also on that list. I've been meaning to read those books for awhile but I just haven't been motivated to take on another fantasy series with big fat books.

I have another challenging book going on in the background. I'm a few days into An Outline of a Theory of Practice. A dozen or so pages in and things still make sense. It's not quite 200 pages so I could make it through the book in a couple of months at my 5 or 6 pages a day pace. We'll see what my mornings look like once we settle into a new morning routine catching buses for school.

Vacation Reading

It's vacation time! I'm packing tonight so we can leave for the beach as soon as I get home tomorrow afternoon (well, I have to pack the cooler first but that's a quick task). With packing comes the need to decide which books to take with me. I like to have plenty of options. I'm firmly into The Goldfinch. I wasn't sure how the must read book of a couple years ago would strike me, but I find myself sacrificing time playing the latest Zelda game to read this instead. That's a strong statement of readability. So The Goldfinch and it's impressive bulk will be coming with me. I'm making steady progress on The Radicalism of the American Revolution. While that's not exactly a beach read, I'm going to take it with me in the event that I want to keep reading my 10 or so pages a day to finally get that one finished. 

Those two books will probably be enough to keep me fully supplied with reading material for the week, but you never know how these things will play out. I will have plenty of room in my bag for another book or two. My plan for the past month or so has been to start reading the Kingkiller Chronicles while at the beach. I started my long journey with The Malazan Book of the Fallen while on vacation at the beach in 2013. It just feels right to start these massive fantasy series while on vacation. I have clear memories of reading A Dance with Dragons in the hotel room at the beach. Thick fantasy tomes goes with the beach like beer and sunscreen.

I'm way behind on my Modern Library Top 100 reading. I will likely throw Deliverance into my bag as well. It's on the shorter side so I might actually get a little closer to my 30 book goal for the year.

The Reef (167 books remain)

I had a post with some comments on The Reef all ready to go, but then I actually finished the book and realized that I had it all wrong. I let the blurb on the back of the book make me think the core commentary of the novel was social criticism and critique of The Patriarchy. It's a much more internal drama. You could read the characters as representing some larger social movement, but the drama is much more personal. The characters are not neat symbols with clearly defined characteristics portraying a single value. They suffer from the complexities and ambiguities inherent in life. Their choices, a consequence of time and circumstances, have consequences. The consequence of choice is really at the core of the novel. You can choose to trust somebody, but do you ever really know what they're thinking or feeling? One person can cause bring you joy and happiness, but the same person can also bring you pain. There is no simple explanation or foolproof method to divine the truth of a person's heart and soul. The novel ends without a neat resolution to the conflict that drives the narrative. There really isn't a story as much as a slow unfolding of a relationship. It's a book that improves after reading. It was hard to read. The pace was slow and the indecision and uncertainty of Anna Leath was frustrating. If I had been quicker to pick up on the reality captured in the novel I may have found it more enjoyable to read. 

It's remarkable that a book written almost a century ago can capture so much of what happens in our modern life. Our human struggles defy time and place. They are constant and universal. Works of art like this do not exist outside of our emotional life. They capture and express our emotions in a way that makes them more understandable and accessible. Edith Wharton can still speak to me years after her death. A shard of her experience matches a small portion of my own life. I can see some of my experience in her's. This peak makes my life a little deeper and meaningful. This is why I read. 

168

I knew this goal was going to be very long term when I started, but the scale of that long term is starting to sink in. While I don't think about the entire mass of the books to read as one big thing to consume, 168 is a large number. I've read that many books over the last four years so it's definitely something that I can accomplish, but the number of books do not tell the entire story. There's a big difference between reading The Sister Brothers or a 007 book and Proust or Joyce. Short and easy to consume books take a few days. Harder titles can take months. Committing to those challenging books is hard. Taking on the challenge is the entire point of forcing myself to read them. My unread books represent unrealized aspirations. They are things that I want to do that remain to be done. It's the realization that my time to do these unrealized things is finiite and slowly ebbing away that drove me to commit to reading all my unread books in the first place. Some will be quick reads that are fun and easy (like Seveneves, my most recently completed title) while other will be challenging slogs that require a focused and concentrated effort (The Radicalism of the American Revolution falls squarely into this category. It's an extremely interesting book written by a true master of the material, but it's kind of boring and not the easiest book to read). 

The reading of the book, not just finishing it, is the entire point of picking it up in the first place. I want to have my horizons broadened and my mind expanded. I want to be shocked and amazed and made more aware of what is hidden and hard to see in our world. There's talking and there's doing. Buying the book is talking. Reading the book is doing. It's the reading that counts. It's the will to embrace the challenge and stick with it despite the difficulties and challenges that counts in this effort. The books will always be here, but I will not. Getting through these books helps me make the most of that limited time.  

Bookshelf Zero Update - 13 squared remain

Book Shelf Zero Status Update:

Owned books read in 2017: 11

Books bought in 2017: 0

Borrowed books read in 2017: 1

Total books read in 2017: 12

Books to be read remaining: 169

I finally made it through Lens of the World over the weekend. I bought that ebook a couple of years ago for a dollar. It wasn't a bad book, but it was definitely a book that I probably wouldn't have bothered finishing if it wasn't for these reading goals. The writing was decent enough, but the story just didn't make any sense. It was an experiment. I've found really good books by buying a cheap ebook. That wasn't the case with this one. 

I've fallen off the 30 books this year pace. Committing to The Radicalism of the American Revolution has slowed me down a bit, but playing Breath of the Wild is the true origin of my reduced reading volume. I've spent many hours playing that game rather than reading. I don't regret that choice one bit, at least not right now, but I would like to pick up the reading a bit more. I'm okay sticking with the dry but very interesting history book if i can find a fun book to read on the Kindle app. I'm thinking Seveneves may be the right ebook for me to realize that situation. Undermajordomo Minor may be another good choice. UM may be the winner because it's short, but it feels like the right time to read Seveneves. I'll take a look at each of them tonight. Regardless of which I pick, I need to read a dozen or so pages of The Radicalism to start to regain some momentum with that one.

I only have to read a group of 13 books 13 times and I will achieve Bookshelf Zero. It's taken me about 6 months to read 13 books so far this year. That's only 6.5 years. That doesn't sound so awful...

Lose Your Gut

The constant refrain on the cover of every men's fitness magazine. Given the generous bellies sported by the vast majority of dudes of all ages at amusement parks (the most abundant place to observe regular people doing living like a huge number of other people), I can understand the marketing potential of such a desirable promise. A gut isn't all about appearance. When you're young and capable, a gut is part of the older guys who look fondly back on their glory days. They're fading. The gut just seems to signify that the best of times are behind us. Fighting against that slowly expanding girth is really a fight against becoming the old guys we mocked when we were young. 

All those lose your gut remedies involve eating the magic diet and sticking with some complicated workout routine. The steps are really just a way to increase self-control and develop better habits. An even better remedy is to live a very simple life focused on feeling rather than feeding. Bloggers of various ilks all seem to believe in minimalism, meditation, and some variation of a vegan/vegetarian diet. Part of this comes from reading each others stuff and part of it comes from not having enough money to have a high-level consumerist lifestyle. That's kind of snarky and jaded of me, I have never talked to one of these guys to really understand their life, but it's a satisfyingly simple explanation for the common elements of the self-improvement self-help internet scribe. 

The simple life is certainly not gut inducing. At least it makes it easier to stick with activities and diets that tend towards a leaner body. If I pursued a simple life (or did not have the means to do things like buy Diamond Club tickets for a Washington Nationals game), my wife and I would be out hiking down by the river or exploring some mountain trail rather than sitting behind the net at Nats Park while a server brings us food and drinks (that are included with the ticket price). We were at the park on Tuesday night. I had two beers, a huge thing of nachos, and a bunch of popcorn. A simple life would me walking around while eating very little. My more complex consumerist life has me sitting around watching elite athletes while I consume all kinds of high calorie goods. The complex consumerist lifestyle is much more fun and pleasurable. 

Staying gut free would be easier if I had programmed myself to abhor consumerism and capitalism when I was younger (or if I had been programmed that way). Viewing pleasurable activities as evil would make them far less appealing. But I had absolutely no shot of being an anti-consumerist radical. I was injected into the respect authority and consuming is fun world. I've never felt the need to turn away from it. I love going to Disney World, the ultimate consumer paradise, and have absolutely no interest in living small. Beers are one of the small pleasures of my life. I've found that I can get by without lots of candy and baked goods, but fatty, salty food is much harder for me to resist. I love meat and enjoy reveling in the abilities that nature has bestowed upon me as a sexually functional male. Fatty stuff fuels that part of my nature. 

The extravagances of the consumer life are not constants. Trips to Disney World or a day at the ballpark are occasional events. The constants that make up the scaffold of these special events are where simple choices are made. Running is a simple thing made all the more complicated by our culture's need to find scarcity and build a market around the desire to have that limited thing. The Boston Qualifier time is the ultimate aim of many runners (I'm way too slow to even consider that at the moment. My fastest 5K ever, which was largely downhill, was run right at the pace I would need for a BQ time. And that only happened because the standard was slightly lower for me once I passed age 40). Equipment of all kinds, from shoes and socks to treadmills and foam rollers, accumulate around the simple act of propelling our bodies forward at a slightly elevated pace. Races are pricey, with those prices only getting bigger as bigger medals and post-run parties are added to enhance the appeal and eventness of contests that have been run for millennia.

Despite all the complexity the market builds into simple things, there are few things simpler than getting up and going for a run. I use a fancy watch that tracks my run and allows me to know just how far I've run and how quickly I've covered that distance at any given time, but there is no product that compels me to get out of bed when it's still dark and head outside to run a few miles right when the birds are just starting to get going. I have a fancy rowing machine in my garage. I may use a TV show as a reason to get out in the garage, but I could choose to just stand on the treadmill to watch the show. I chose to row while I'm watching the show.

As I write these tortured paragraphs, I'm struck by the thought that all of the advocacy of certain lifestyles is really nothing more than one person framing the limit of their consumer opportunities as a desirable state. I'm really doing nothing more than justifying my own choices. The real question is why I feel like I have to justify anything in the first place. My life is my life. Whether I decide to adopt the worldview imposed on me by the conditions of my birth or choose to rail against everything that more rebellious factions of society say is poison and evil is ultimately entirely my decision. It affects me and my family. Whether some hipster in Harlem would make the same choices is irrelevant. 

Book Shelf Zero check in

8 down, 172 to go. 

I'm locked in this challenging cycle of picking books that read very quickly followed by books that just drag and drag. I raced through Freedom and struggled through Jonathan Strange & Dr. Norrell. The Handmaid's Tale was a very zippy book, but it took me a while to get going with A Time of Gifts. Sapiens was quick. The Mysterious Benedict Society #2 (a book I borrowed from my 11 year old) took me a little while to finish. About a Boy was a very quick read. (I've read my Nick Hornby book, I'm not too upset that I can't pick up another one anytime soon, although his books look like they're good for a quick read, that could come in handy from time to time.) 

So I'm in the slog phase of my reading cycle. I started reading Crime and Punishment again. It felt like the right book to read. I was wrong. I was making absolutely no progress. So I set it aside and started reading A Confederacy of Dunces. This is one of those books that I've heard so many people talk about but have never really felt the desire to read myself. I used to work with a guy who raved about it, and he wasn't really much of a regular reader. The guy who checked me out when I bought it sometime in 2015 mentioned how much he loved the book. It's oh so funny. I haven't laughed once, but I do find myself going back to the book pretty willingly. It moves surprisingly fast. I don't feel like I've spent much time reading it but I'm almost a third of the way through it. I'm not sure if I agree with all the praise, but at least it's a fun, easy read.

Assuming I finish Toole's book by the end of the month, I'll be right on pace for 30 books this year. I'll need to read at least 31 to end the year below 150 books on my to be read list, but I should be able to manage that...as long as I don't end up bogged down in this quick/slow cycle for too long.

My annual A race - the Monument Avenue 10K

We're two days out from my annual physical fitness test, the Monument Avenue 10K. My time in these 6.2 miles becomes my gauge for what I'm capable of as a runner for the rest of the year. I put way too much emphasis and energy into realizing a time goal in this race. Failing to meet my goal or not running as fast as the previous year feels like some kind of personal failing. It really just means I didn't spend enough time training for the race. 

The Monument Avenue 10K helps me understand my evolution and development as a runner. The first time I ran this race I trained almost exclusively on a treadmill. I would go to the gym on my lunch break and get in 45 minutes or so. I would be gone from work for a couple of hours. I rarely ran outside. Rowing was a big part of my training back then too. Now I do almost all of my running outside. I almost abandoned rowing over the last couple of years, but I've picked it back up after my August knee injury. My times don't really vary much over the years. I broke 50 minutes for the first time last year, but my slowest time is only 4 or 5 minutes slower than that. 

I guess it's the consistency of my participation in this race that makes it so meaningful. I'm out there every year. Some years I've been able to train for months, while my training has been less than optimal due to injuries. I'm out there racing my younger self, and every year that passes gives that younger version of me more of an advantage. I have to work harder to keep up with him, and really put in the effort if I want to surpass my younger self. There are plenty of guys my age who run much faster than me. I have room to improve. The question is just how much I want to improve. 

14 day of Mud Madness complete, only 11 to go

My body has adjusted to the extra activity of the rowing challenge. I definitely felt drained after the first 6 days, but I haven't felt particularly fatigued since that first week. I even managed to break 19 minutes in a 5000 m rowing session on Wednesday. That's the first time that I've managed that in years. I'm particularly pleased that I've managed to work these rowing sessions into my established routine rather than replacing running or lifting with rowing. It makes for some active days, but I've been trying to keep the pace easy on days that I'm just not feeling all that primed to push. In previous attempts at this challenge I always felt obligated to keep my pace below 2 minutes/500 meters. I've abandoned that arbitrary pace this time around. I did 5000 m last night while watching basketball. It took me 22 minutes. I took a couple of very quick breaks to mess with my music, but those breaks weren't long enough to have a big impact on my time. I did do a crazy 500 m sprint at the end, but that was just for fun. Consistently getting on the rowing machine makes the difference. The pace of those meters is secondary to getting them done. 

It will be no problem getting in my meters today. This is the first half day Friday of 2017. I'm taking my car to get the oil changed, but I should have a solid hour or two after my car is done to lift and row today's 5000 m. I was in Chicago for some worthless training this time last year. Two years ago was the first time I lifted at Crunch. I spent the rest of that day getting groceries and taking my daughter to Girl Scouts. I'm getting lunch some place with TVs while my car is in the garage. I may even break my beer only on Saturdays rule. Or I may just get iced tea. I'll see how I'm feeling in that moment. I'm giving myself a chance to actually enjoy today. It really sucked to be away from my family last year. The flight back was delayed so I didn't get home until early Saturday morning. Today is a day to celebrate all that is good in my life.

I've been consistent with eating more carefully. I have probably given myself more passes recently than I should, but I've lost almost all of the weight I gained post-August keen injury. I was 218 Tuesday morning. I floated right around 217 before I got hurt. It's nice to see the numbers go down, but I'm more focused on sticking to the process of eating healthy and working out regularly.

Yesterday was not the best day for my eating. I planned on going to Subway for lunch, but there was no place to park (the Subway is in the same shopping center as a Buffalo Wild Wings and a local university was playing in the tournament at that time). I went to Taco Bell instead. I didn't go overboard at Taco Bell, but it was definitely more than a veggie sub and some Doritos. I wasn't sure when I was going to have dinner so I picked up a bag of Doritos and a Kind bar. I ate a few Doritos in the car as I drove back to work. I finished the bag and had my Kind bar as I was driving home. It turns out I left early enough that my wife was able to cook me dinner. So I went home and ate that. I didn't have anything else that night, but it was still more food than I normally eat in a day. This is after having a piece of pizza and some cake after a very filling dinner on Thursday. Today is not going all that well either. I grabbed an egg mcmuffin on my way in, had a donut in a meeting, and then had a cookie and some cake at another meeting. I should seriously consider getting a salad for lunch and skipping the beer. Sure, I was on the treadmill for almost a half hour this morning and I will row later, but that activity is not enough to cancel out all those calories!

After finishing A Time of Gifts, I moved on to Sapiens. It's a very interesting book that reads fast. It's nice to be reading a book that I actually look forward to opening and have a hard time putting down. I've struggled with enough books this year. I'm ready to just read fun stuff for the rest of the year. I won't, Book Shelf Zero doesn't have room for that, but I will be sure to work in some less onerous books between the real drags. To the Lighthouse drags on. I get through a few pages when I can. The mornings have become a less than ideal time to read. These half day Fridays only make it more challenging. I would rather get in to work so I can leave earlier rather than sit around at home and extending the time I have to spend at work. 

A Time of Gifts - 5 down, 175 to go

There will be plenty of periods like this as I slowly work toward Book Shelf Zero. I've stuck myself with some less than thrilling reads that take a little while to get through. I'm going to go through long periods where nothing gets finished while I slowly chip away at some decent but very slow going book. That is the case for A Time for Gifts. It's not bad. It just gets a little redundant and repetitive about half way through the book. Long descriptions of churches and other buildings are extremely dull. The language is different and interesting, but there is just nothing much to keep me engaged with Fermor's long walk other than a desire to finish the book. He's happy to dawdle. I just wanted to get to the end. I'm happy to have this one behind me. Five down. 175 to go.

The most interesting thing about A Time of Gifts is the way it captures what life was like for an ordinary person in late 1930's Europe. Thinking about what somebody following in Fermor's steps walking from Holland to Constantinople (or Budapest, which is where this book ends, the rest of his journey is in a second book, which I don't own) would experience in 2017 is an interesting exercise. I don't think a dirty 19 your old would be received quite so readily these days (assuming that the memories and stories in the book are accurate). He wouldn't have to worry about losing his diary because each stage of the walk would be captured on social media and I wouldn't have to worry about reading long descriptions of buildings because there would be numerous pictures for every site he visits. There may still be some mountain trails that a person could walk on between villages in the Austria or Germany, but roads and railroads have likely taken much of that ground. The world is very different. Of course, Fermor spends plenty of time thinking about the great historical moments (mostly the ancient Roman historical events) that happened in the different places he passes through. He notes the way cultures and people migrate and move over time. He sees echoes of that ancient time. His book grabs the moment he experienced and holds it for the future.

March 6, 2017

(Only getting around to posting this on March 11. Just wanted to capture these thoughts and put them in their proper place)

This Mud Madness thing is wiping me out. My body just feels worn out and tired. Eating less while doing all this additional exercise probably isn't the best idea. I felt pretty weak lifting weights today. I interpret that as my body just not having all that it needs to keep up with the demands I'm putting on it. I have never had sustained activity like this over an extended period of time. I'm in new territory and need to keep that in mind as I proceed over the next couple of weeks.

Tomorrow is a total rest day. I was already using Tuesday as a rest day before I added in in the extra rowing so it was an easy call to use that as one of my 6 March non-rowing days. I will also be weighing myself tomorrow. That will give me an idea of what's going on weight wise. The scale has been telling me I'm losing weight for the last couple of weeks. I'm right at this moment wearing pants that were too tight when we went on our Disney trip in January. I want that lost weight to be fat and not muscle. Too much weight too fast is not the idea. 

For the record, this is what I've done since the Mud Madness thing started last Wednesday:

Wednesday: Rowed 5000 m; 20 minutes or so of weight lifting; 11,938 steps

Thursday: Ran 4.81 miles, rowed 2600 m in the morning, 2400 m in the evening, 15,993 steps

Friday: Ran 2 treadmill miles, 15 minutes or so of weight lifting, rowed 2500 m at the gym and 2500 m at home in the evening, 15.101 steps

Saturday: Ran 6 miles in the morning, rowed 5000 m in the evening, 16,387 steps

Sunday: Rowed 5000 m, 7522 steps

Monday: Ran 3.5 miles at 8:03 pace, rowed 2500 m before lifting, rowed another 2500 m after dinner, 15,025 steps

The running and rowing days are tough. I felt alright on the rowing machine earlier this afternoon. I'm not looking forward to the second 2500 m segment tonight. I missed my step target yesterday because I was just dragging after dinner. I thought it was better to go to bed and get the rest rather than staying up an extra half hour to hit 10,000 steps. The early bed time was especially important given that my alarm goes off at 5 on Monday morning.

I added a small snack to my lunch this afternoon after feeling so low energy. I had some flavored pecans. They were very tasty. The probably weren't the best choice, but any kind of pecan beats a Taco Bell bean burrito or a bag of Doritos. 

Plenty of rowing and running, but not much reading

I'm 4 for 4 on the Mud Madness Challenge. I've also maintained my running workouts. A 6 mile run and 5000 m of rowing is a pretty significant amount of exercise in one day. I'm getting in the workouts, but the quality of those workouts may be suffering a bit. I'm taking it easy when I'm rowing, but all that exertion still builds up. My run today was at my intended pace, I did 6 miles at just under 9 minutes a mile, but meeting my target pace may be  more difficult as I get deeper into the month. I remember struggling to get in the 5000 m one night and easily doing 5000 m in a close to PR time the next night the last time I tried to do this Mud Madness thing. (The last time I tried was in 2013.  I rowed my best 5000 m ever in early April. There is no doubt that all the rowing in March built up my fitness to the point where I could do 5000 m in 18:29.6. I'm still looking to break 19 minutes this year.) It may be more beneficial to do fewer workouts with higher intensity, but that's not the challenge. The Mud Madness Challenge is all about volume. I'm going to keep pouring it on.

I will not be finishing another book anytime soon. I'm halfway through A Time of Gifts. With a concentrated effort, I can make it through 10% of that book a day. At that pace, I could it finished before next weekend. I may take that shot. It's just dragging so much. I have no time to read To the Lighthouse. I read in the morning twice this week. I had a doctor's appointment on Monday, I used my Tuesday reading time on a different project, I rowed Wednesday, I managed to read a few page son Thursday, and I had to hustle in to work after running Friday morning. I'm shooting for 3 solid morning reading sessions next week. Monday, Tuesday, and Thursday. Getting to the halfway point of that book would be good progress.

I'm surprised that I've stuck with my beer on Saturday only rule. I was tempted to have one last night, but I was pretty tired and went to bed kind of early for a Friday. I'm working on my second beer of the day right now. That will be it for the day. I keep wanting to have a four or five beer Saturday, but it just doesn't seem to work out that way. Oh well, fewer beers means fewer calories.

Concept2 Mud Madness Day 1

The company that makes my rowing machine has a challenge every March. Row at least 5000 m for 25 days of the month. I have attempted this challenge many times and have achieved it exactly zero times. I'm going for it again this year. I did my normal 5000 m of rowing this morning. So far so good.

I also went to the gym to lift at lunch. My gym has a couple of Concept2 machines. This could be critical to finally beating this challenge. We'll see...

Obsession shift in progress...

I have discovered the vast amount of Walt Disney World related content on the internet. I knew of a few planning sites from my last couple of trips, but there is oh so much more out there. Multiple blogs are dedicated to planning the trip (just planning, not actually saying anything about the parks or resorts, that's a whole other subset of blogs), and there are several podcasts as well. I'm sure there are numerous YouTube channels. I have discovered these rich veins of WDW topics and nuance in my effort to prepare myself for next year's half marathon. You could really feed an obsession with this kind of material. It's so plentiful that it can never be completely depleted. Just the runDisney tag on Instagram alone gets dozens of posts a day. That traffic will spike with this weekend's Princess Half Marathon weekend.

I'll be watching all of these posts unfold. My someday I'll do a runDisney race becoming I'm doing that in less than a year has become this year's obsession du jour. Last year I was all about my reading. It was about this time last year that I upped my reading goal to 52 books and decided to pursue Book Shelf Zero (I'm down to 176 after finishing Boy's Life Friday night). My runDisney experience is building to that same level of preoccupation. Our trip to WDW in January went about as ideally as possible. The positive vibes of that trip continue to persist a month after we got home. We did so much, but there were still things we weren't able to experience. And that's how they suck you in. You go down there once without any idea what you're doing. It's fun, but you're really only experiencing the parks and resorts at about 60% of maximum fun. So you go back and delve a little deeper into the nuances of everything. You find a great resort that allows you to walk to two parks with easy access to two other resorts. Options for what to do and where to eat abound. You try this and that, luck into a great evening after coming outside to eat, and see other places you want to visit and things you want to try. (And discover that some things people get all geeked about, like Dole Whips, really don't live up to the hype. I would take one of those Mickey ice cream bars over the Dole Whip every time.)

So you decide that you'll go back. You didn't get to eat in Mexico (the circumstances surrounding that failure stands out as the only really dark spot in our entire trip) so you want to check that off the next time you're down there. There are more rides to be experienced, more restaurants to check out, and more places to visit. Then you start reading these blogs and listening to these podcasts and discover a whole new level of park experience. The runDisney thing is just that kind of experience. The races are a different way to experience Disney magic while finding a whole new genre of merchandise to spend money on. This could be my only runDisney race, I have to get a jacket! Then they change the park, adding more attractions and tweaking what is already there. It's an endless cycle that draws you in deeper and deeper with every new post and update.(The Disney Parks Blog is particularly prodigious. There are several posts a day. And I suspect this is the slow season.)

Small victories

Things are really starting to move. 

I finished The Handmaid's Tale. Fantastic book. That gets me down to 177 books to be read. I'm rapidly approaching the end of Boy's Life. There is too much going on in that book, but I've gotten to a point where the story is finally starting to move a bit. The lack of competing reading demands has also made it easy to commit to that book rather than jumping back to Jonathan Strange. Now that I think about it, the massive gravity of Jonathan Strange was probably my biggest challenge with Boy's Life.

I read a few pages of To the Lighthouse on Monday. I read a column on Medium about a DIY MFA and To the Lighthouse was mentioned in the context of reading hard books. I wanted to gauge that difficulty for myself. I actually like the writing style and didn't find the first 10 pages overly ponderous. The perspective shifts from one character to the next with no warning, but I'm kind of nonlinear in my thinking style so that discontinuity makes sense to me. I'm due to read another Modern Library 100 book so that might be the next book that I focus on after I finish Boy's Life later this week.

My weight is finally going down. I spent a bunch of time at work last week reading a short stack of papers about energy expenditure. Those papers suggested that diet was much more critical to weight control than exercise. My discovery of these papers neatly coincided with the release of a book about the role of the brain in eating and obesity. I used an Audible credit to get it the day it came out (Hamilton can wait until next month). The book, it's called The Hungry Brain, is engrossing, informative, and simply astounding. It's gets pretty technical in places concerning neuroanatomy and chemical pathways, but as a scientist I very much appreciate this aspect of the book. 

The Hungry Brain just reinforced everything I learned from reading the energy expenditure papers. I will never lose weight until I eat right. My workouts burn calories, but any deficit those workouts create is usually nullified by excessive eating. A few snacks here, a couple of treats there, throw in a few beers, and I've basically given back all the calories I burned working out. I avoided those behaviors last week and dropped a couple of pounds. We'll see if this trend continues. Sticking to my workout routine is hopefully contributing as well. I've managed to maintain the Wednesday rowing session and Friday morning short run. My body felt pretty tired while I was rowing this morning and during my lifting workout over lunch, but I can't tell if that's workout fatigue of lack of sleep. Getting more sleep is another piece of this weight control puzzle. That's definitely the hardest behavior for me to modify.

I successfully registered my wife and I for the Disney World Half Marathon yesterday. I jumped on the site minutes after registration opened to ensure that we could do the race. This is my best chance to do one of these races for the next couple of years. I don't want to miss it. I am more excited for this race than any race that I've run since I started running races consistently. I don't have to worry about training for this as I will be a couple of months past my full marathon and we're not running it for time. This is about the experience. I can't wait. Only 321 days to go!

My running plan for 2017 (and a few days into 2018)

I've been slowly working on a post about the races I'm planning on running this year. I have a nice progression from 10K in April to a half marathon in August to a full marathon in November. There will be some other races thrown in there as well, but the 10K, half, full will be the main focuses of my training for most of this year. They won't be the main focus of my running energy though. I'm poised to realize a running goal that I've had for two years. I am planning on running the half marathon at Disney World in January.

The excitement that I get just writing that sentence is unreasonably intense. I have no idea why I find the idea of this half so exciting, but I've been stoked from the moment my wife said we should do the half. I've been wanting to run a runDisney event since I was reading about the Dopey Challenge while we were in Disney World two years ago. I find the Dopey Challenge totally crazy and really have no desire to try that (just the entry fee alone is totally insane), but I'm very happy to be doing the half-marathon. A half feels like an event but it's not so long that I'll be totally fried for the rest of the weekend. The half is also on Saturday so we can spend Sunday doing the parks before heading home on Monday.

I've already booked our room for the weekend, and have started looking at flights. There is a flight that leaves nice and early, 5:30 am, and gets to Orlando at 12:30. We need to get there early enough that we can make it to the expo to get our numbers and still have some time to check out at least one park. The races start ridiculously early so we'll have two very early wake up calls back to back, but that's a small price to pay for getting to do the race and having some kid free time at Disney World. (Yet another reason not to do the Dopey Challenge, four days in a row of ridiculously early wake up calls.)

My first marathon will be a huge focus of my running effort this year, but the Disney Half is the race that I am most looking forward to over the next year. I'm preparing myself to see my Monument Avenue 10K time slip from what I did last year (I was running so much faster on my weekly runs this time last year, I just don't see how I'm running at that level by April 1), and I'm uneasy about what I can do in the Patrick Henry Half after how much I struggled with my training last year (and had no chance to actually see how I could run after messing up my knee a few weeks before the race). I may run a few smaller races throughout the year. There's a 12K that I've run the last couple of years on Memorial Day (although I think we may be in DC for a baseball game this year), and we always do the cul-de-sac 5Ks in July. I would really like to run one of those all out this year. I like to run a 10K on Thanksgiving morning (I really want to run a course PR this year, I should be in pretty good shape coming off of the marathon a few weeks prior), and the Surf and Santa 5 miler has emerged as an annual must run event for the entire family (well, we walk it anyway). All of those races are much lower priorities than the Monument Avenue 10K, the Patrick Henry Half Marathon, and the Richmond Marathon. And those are not nearly as exciting as the Walt Disney World Marathon Weekend Half Marathon.

2 down, Book Shelf Zero is 178 books away

One book closer to Bookshelf Zero. My long slog with Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell has been completed. I complained about the pace of this book when I was mired in its early sections. The pace of the book picked up tremendously as the story progressed. It was a very good book, but there is something about it that just doesn't sit right with me. I appreciate its originality and well crafted narrative, but it lacks some vital spark that I just can't quite express. It left me wanting, but what I'm left wanting isn't clear. Regardless of my reservations about where this book fits in my personal liking scale, it's been read. Two books down, 178 remain. 

I'm tearing through The Handmaid's Tale. Whatever Jonathan Strange lacked, this book overflows with it. Atwood's novel is emotionally intense, but I feel compelled to just keep reading. I think about how I would feel to be forcefully separated from my wife and kids. That's emotional devastation on an epic scale. But amid all this horror and tragedy, Atwood weaves in these poetic and beautiful images. The irony that a woman is writing this book about a culture in which women are not allowed to read or write has its own poetic irony. I'm curious if I would have responded so strongly to this novel if I had read it a few years ago. I've read a few books over the last few years that have catalyzed some changes I was struggling to make in my personal life. This book marks another step in that process. I read to experience books like this.

Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell took me a month (to the day). The Handmaid's Tale will take me less than a week. I haven't touched Boy's Life since I was in Disney World. I've promised my son that I will read a book from a series that he enjoys next. The first one was not the most exciting read but it wasn't terrible either. It will not demand my attention like The Handmaid's Tale so I will likely slip back over to Boy's Life now and then just to mix things up a bit to keep chipping away at a book that I never should have bought in the first place. Sure, Boy's Life was on a dollar, but it's taking a long time to read. It's not so bad that I want to abandon it. I just want to read something else. 

Reading/Audible update

We're into February and I only have one book in my books read list for 2017. This is why I never get around to reading big fat books like Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell. It just takes so long! JS & Mr. N is even longer than its 850 pages suggests. The book is full of footnotes that use a much smaller font than the main text. If all of these were expanded to the main text font, they would probably take up another 50 or so pages. And it's not like they can be skipped. Key descriptions and details about the story are in the notes. I've read 80% of the book, footnotes and all. I will likely finish it next week. Then it will be on to the Handmaiden's Tale. That book looks so small and insignificant next to Jonathan Strange. Hopefully that one won't take me a month to read.

I am very, very close to finishing my current audiobook. Originals. I read one of Adam Grant's other books, Give and Take, a few years ago and found it suitably useful and interesting to give Originals a chance. I've grown tired of the business book sub-genre that cobbles together stories of successful (and usually famous) people with findings from various academic research papers to tell a story of why certain behaviors win in the marketplace. Maybe I've just never tried to fully internalize and apply the lessons from those books, but I've found that I get much more from reading literature. Originals is a strong offering in this sub-genre. Grant's academic background gives him much more authority when discussing academic research papers than a journalist or some other productivity or entrepreneurship writer. The book still feels kind of worthless in the end. I'm happy to have it nearly complete. I'm ready to get back to the fun of sci fi and fantasy books. I will also be able to add another book to my Goodreads list. I don't include audiobooks in my annual list, but it will contribute to my read list (542 and counting).

The desire to buy books is very low at the moment.  The audiobook escape valve is definitely helpful in keeping my acquisitiveness under control. I have an Audible credit waiting to be used. I want to finish Originals before I use it for the lame reason that my unread audiobook tally will remain constant rather than going up when I use the credit. I'm planning to use it on Chernow's Hamilton bio. I've been tempted to get that book in the past, and listening to the Hamilton cast album has pushed that book into the I want to read it pile (as opposed to the that might be kind of interesting pile). The audiobook is over 30 hours. I've been listening at the 1.25 playback speed so it will be more like 25 hours assuming I keep it at that speed. A big unknown with audiobooks is the quality of the narration. I have listened to Hamilton's narrator before so I know that the narration will be solid. 

I could make a big dent in whatever audiobook I choose to listen to next while I'm driving around tomorrow. (Even if I use my credit on Hamilton right now, I'm not going to listen to that one next. Originals was a recent purchase. It's time to go back and listen to something I've had for awhile.) My wife is running an ultra tomorrow. I will be spending tons of time in the car as I get her to the race, pick up my kids, drive back home to drop one of my kids off for a birthday party, and head back up to the race (which is about an hour from my house) to cheer her on as she finishes her run. Well, assuming my daughter stays with my mom while I'm dropping off her brother. I could have a couple hours of solo driving time. I'm thinking of going with Warbreaker by Brandon Sanderson as my next audiobook. I've had it for awhile and it feels like the right time for another Sanderson book. I absolutely love his Stormlight Archives books. I have listened to the first two volumes. I'm considered going back through them in preparation for the release of book 3 later this year. That is a very substantial time commitment as each book is something like 40 hours long. I don't expect Warbreaker to come close to either of those books, nothing I've read by Sanderson has come close to the Stormlight Archives, but his books are reliably entertaining. Now if I could bring myself to read the third book of the Mistborn trilogy.

The Dip

I'm in the middle of a very dreary dip. Work has become a treadmill. I go in, do my thing, and nothing really seems to happen. Organizational upheaval has prevented some changes that may have given my relationship with my job a jolt, but it's hard to say how long that shock would have kept me engaged with the work. It will be nice to get my bonus, but I'm just not excited about my work these days. I'm bored. I'm tired of dealing with the same old things over and over again. I went for change last year and was jilted in both of my attempts. I can keep treading water for a little while longer, but it's getting harder and harder to show up and appear engaged. 

My reading life is in a dip too. I am persevering with Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell. I'm not quite two thirds of the way through the book. It's not boring and hard to get through anymore, but it's not a particularly fast read. I made bad decision when I went with Boy's Life on my phone. I wisely paired long physical books with short ebooks last year. That successful strategy left me with few easy read ebooks remaining in my library (which was why I was hoping to see the Bond books go on sale towards the end of last year). Boy's Life is a mediocre read. I'm very close to giving up on it. I just can't get all that excited about reading it. I'm only about a third of the way through it. Maybe I will make more progress on it once I'm finished with the massive JS & Mr N. Starting a new book with that one unfinished just doesn't sound appealing. I'll probably keep at it. I have to read it eventually anyway. 

Aside from missing my step target yesterday, I achieved every one of my weekly fitness goals last week. Three trips to the gym to lift, two rowing sessions (Wednesday morning and Sunday), three runs (I cut my Saturday run short to save my body, I don't want to ramp up my mileage too fast), ab work five days of the week, and at least 10,000 daily steps. My success in this area is impacting my reading pace. The additional Tuesday and Friday workouts take a big bite out of my reading time. I was expecting this, but it's still kind of hard for me to see that reading time slip by. I will see my reading time shrink again if I can get myself to bed earlier. That's the last piece of getting my fitness plan fully activated. I'm not getting to bed early enough. I'm also not sleeping well. I wake up and have trouble getting back to sleep. This is a new problem for me. I think I know what may be causing it and how I can make it better. We'll see if anything changes once I start addressing the possible origin of my disturbed sleep cycle. 

I've decided to weigh myself on Tuesdays. I was 224.4 last Tuesday. We'll see what the increased workouts did to my weight tomorrow morning. My appetite was crazy last week. I managed to control myself pretty well during the week, but may have been a little too free during the weekend. The scale will tell the tale soon enough. (Why Tuesday? It's my off day.)

Vacation over - back to real life

I'm doing it all wrong. If all those productivity bloggers on the internet are right, I should be spending more time meditating, reading Marcus Aurelius, and eating a vegan (or at least vegetarian) diet. I should have taken my family to some foreign country (while packing as few items as possible and staying in Airbnbs rather than some corporate hotel) instead of spending a week strolling through the various Disney World Parks. The fact that all those bloggers are just reading each other and attempting to build a brand and business around their own variation of the secret sauce for living a productive and happy life (which almost invariably include meditation, minimalism, and not eating meat) detracts a bit from the power of their interrelated and inbred ideas. It's not that their ideas are necessarily bad, they're just redundant and boring. Except for their promotion of reading. Reading is a great way to improve your life. I can always get behind people reading more books. 

Reading was not a big part of my life last week. My mini-bacchanal of eating whatever I wanted and generally just enjoying myself did not really include a significant amount of reading. I just didn't feel like it. I read a little, but I made no significant progress in either Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell or A Boy's Life. I really have no problem with that. I thought I might feel bad about not reading more, but I was content to just slip into the alternate reality of life in a Disney Resort. I was largely disconnected from my day to day reality. It was family and fun. I paid no attention to politics and gave passing notice to the sports world. I played lots of Mario Run (and now that I've completed all the most salient tasks in the game, I suspect that my desire to play will diminish). 

I was very successful in ignoring the reality of my diet while in WDW. I didn't really worry about the caloric content or health consequences of anything that I ate. I figured this would be my last big chance to really enjoy my food for a little while. Eating tons of deserts and other junky foods for a week does a good job of satisfying cravings for that kind of food. It's easier to focus on eating right after spending so much time not worrying about it. I think I can make it to my summer vacation before I'll feel the need to really splurge. Hopefully I will drop a few pounds before I'm at the beach for a week towards the end of July. I was surprised to see that I didn't gain any weight last week when I summoned up the courage to step on the scale this morning. I guess walking around pretty much all day (I average over 23,000 steps) is a good counter to the less than stellar vacation diet. 

Spending so much time in the close company of really obese people is also a good prod to take better care of myself. I have plenty of extra flesh around my mid-section, but my shirt hangs straight down from my chest. So many people in the park (men, women, and, most disturbingly of all, kids) have these huge guts. My big observation was that lots of fat makes men look like women and women look like men. There were so many people on motorized carts. It was depressing. I felt the same motivation that I had when I left the park last time to get my own diet and activity levels up so I can stay active and be in better shape the next time I visit the park. I have no desire to be limited in what I can do because my body prevents me from getting and having fun and enjoying myself.

I was definitely in better running shape this time than I was on our last visit. I was in the final stages of recovery from some calf issues that pretty much destroyed my running in 2014 during out last trip to WDW in January 2015. I managed to get in a couple of miles around the Animal Kingdom parking lot on that trip. I got in two runs this time. I did a 5K our first morning in the resort. We stayed in the Boardwalk Villas so there were some good running trails right outside the hotel. I didn't have to use the parking lot this time. I wasn't trying to kill myself, but I managed to run a negative split for each of the three miles. By the time Thursday rolled around I thought there was no way I would get in a decent run. My legs were so tired from being on my feet for pretty much the entire week. The fatigue was definitely present, but I managed to run 3.5 miles at a reasonable pace. That energy was gone by Saturday. I think it was more the emotional toll of being at the end of vacation as much as the physical effect of having walked around so much the previous seven days, but I just couldn't get myself out of bed to workout on Saturday morning. 

My reentry into normal life has been as smooth as I could hope. I got out and ran Monday morning. My pace was the fastest it's been in awhile. I'm getting back to where I was pre-injury, at least on the 3.5 mile loops around my neighborhood. I need to start adding some distance to my runs on the weekend. I also made it to the gym despite having a meeting compressing my available workout time and tons of rain making the trip into the gym from the car less than ideal. It was a short workout but seeing that it was my first in over a week, I was fine with easing my way back in to the weights. I'm waiting to see if I get sore. I'm not really feeling anything as of now, but it usually takes a good 24 hours for the DOMS to really get going. 

I successfully piloted two additional workouts in the week before we went on vacation. I squeezed in an extra 5000 m of rowing on Wednesday and two miles of running on Friday. Tomorrow will be my first attempt at the rowing without the benefit of my kids not needing to catch the bus. I would like to row before my kids get up, but it's much more likely that I will row after they are on the bus. We'll see how it goes tomorrow morning. 

  

Post from a train

I'm somewhere in southern North Carolina. We'll be in South Carolina fairly soon. Hopefully I'll be asleep by then. I can just start reading Jonathan Syrange & Mr. Norrell if I have much trouble getting to sleep. All the years of avoiding this book were well spent. I keep waiting for something to happen. It just keeps dragging on. I can make myself get in 30 pages or so but it's a struggle to read much past that. I'm fearing a Fellowship of the Rings situation brewing. Just because loads of other people love a certain book is no guarantee that it will be something I enjoy with the same fervor. It's not a bad book. I will keep reading it, but it's so long.

Maybe I will have a repeat of my latest audiobook experience. I nearly bailed on Asimov's Amongst the Gods, but I stuck with it. The middle section was a huge drag. It had a fun ending that made the tedium of the section worth the slog through multiple sections switching between three different characters. The third section really saved the book. It tied everything together and was brisk and engaging. It wasn't exactly my kind of book, but I can recognize excellent work when it doesn't resonate with my taste. I'm hoping Jonathan Strange will reward my effort in a similar fashion. Dickens books always take forever to build and end in a flourish that makes the previous hundreds of pages worth the effort. Jonathan Steange has Dickensian aspirations. Perhaps those aspirations will be realized in the end.

Cramming workout time into my routine

I got up 10 minutes earlier than normal this morning so I could get in a 5000 m rowing session. I usually get up and shower before I wake up my kids, but I just got dressed and headed downstairs today. I was on the rowing machine 10 minutes after my alarm went off. That's pretty good for me. It sometimes takes me 30 minutes to get out the door for a morning run. I wasn't feeling superb during the rowing, but I stuck with it and got in the full distance. I felt better at the end than I had in the first 1000 m or so. The shift in how I started my day didn't cause any issues with my parental duties. I woke my kids up after I finished rowing and managed to get them to their daycare (schools are still closed from Saturday's snow) on time. I even dragged myself into work 30 minute earlier than normal for a meeting with my boss. This bodes well for incorporating an additional workout into my weekly routine. An extra 50 or so 5000 m rowing sessions will net me an extra 250,000 m over the course of the year (I will miss weeks that I'm on vacation or doing other fun family stuff). 

The workout fit in well with the must get done parts of my day, but my reading time did get squeezed a bit. Reading volume is really nothing more than a reflection of time spent reading. I lost about 10 pages of reading this morning. It's more important that I take care of my body than grab a few more pages of reading. It's not as much about the progress I'm making in my book of the moment as it's about breaking a habit. I've been reading in the morning after my kids are on their way to school (or at their daycare in the summer) for a couple of years. Breaking that habit is the real challenge. I'm focused on the reading aspect of it because I have this compulsion to finish books (and spending more time reading gets me to the end of a book faster), but the challenge is really about modifying the way I start my day. 

It's critical that I maintain my current habits while establishing some new ones. I went to the gym today at lunch after almost talking myself out of it this morning. My desire to lift was low, but it was hard to justify not going when I realized that I would just go out for lunch if I skipped the gym. Spending money and skipping a workout is hard to justify when I have a lunch ready to eat in my car. The no book buying rule for this year also plays a role in maintaining my lunch time trips to the gym. Visiting a book store is my preferred not going to the gym at lunch activity. I have no reason to visit a book store if I'm not buying anything. I almost talked myself into going so I could shop for books to get on Audible, but that became a non-issue when I convinced myself to go lift at lunch. 

I'm not totally immune to temptations and cravings. I did hit Taco Bell to try one of the double stack tacos after my workout. After avoiding beer all weekend, pushing myself to the gym, and settling into no book shopping (which includes losing the Daily Deal email, a fun little part of my morning for the last couple of years), I felt alright letting my willpower recovery for a moment. The fact that I will allow myself to eat all kinds of not so healthy food next week also played a role. Why push so hard to resist my taco urging today when I'm going to be eating all I care to eat breakfast buffets and countless desserts and small treats while walking around Disney next week? So I tried the taco. It was very good. I enjoyed it tremendously.

1 down, 179 to go

I finished Freedom yesterday. Freedom is an excellent novel. The writing is outstanding and the struggles and conflicts that drive the story bubble with authenticity. I've been dealing with family discord of my own and every parent knows what it's like to question your choices and worry that you're not doing the best that you can for your children. There is a very strong political current throughout the story. Those aspects of the novel were highlighted by the moderators of a couple of podcasts I've listened to since finishing the book, but I don't see them as essential to the novel's success. Politics were more a prop driving actions and identity. The novel succeeds despite the politics. Bush was a big deal to people when Franzen was writing the book, but he's faded in relevance, particularly with the rise of Trump. 

The characters just felt politically naive to me. They adopted well established liberal positions with little conflict or thought. There is a smug superiority in their positions, particularly Walter's environmentalist crusade, and they eagerly criticize those few characters who take different political positions. The depiction of this uncritical adoption of the "correct" position on socially charged issues resonates with me after watching the reaction to Trump's election. I was shocked by how easily people had accepted the characterization of Trump as a homophobic, bullying bore. People had picked Hillary's team and were happy to cheer for her while rooting against the evil Trump. The sad truth is that the major parties are essentially working towards the same end (consolidation of power). They use different words and distract people from what they're doing by feeding the media's drive to cast every political contest as some kind of big game, but people in Washington just want to get power and money regardless of their party affiliation. Decisions are made based on which position consolidates influence and wealth in the hands of somebody with a big office somewhere in DC or NoVa. Larger societal concerns are secondary.

So it's on to the next book. If I did not have a long trip to Disney World on the almost immediate horizon (next week!) I would just have picked up Crime and Punishment and been on my way. Thinking about reading Crime and Punishment while riding on the train down to Florida (an overnight trip with a solid couple of hours remaining in the trip after we wake up) made me reconsider that course of action. It didn't take me long to settle on Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell. I've had this highly regarded and frequently included in all kinds of best fantasy book lists book on my shelves for years. I've been putting it off because it's long. I spent a couple of years with the long fantasy books of the Malazan series. Something like JS & Mr. N is not exactly the first thing that came to mind when I was looking for something to read between those Malazan monsters. It also lives on an out of the way bookcase in an extra bedroom. I have to intentionally go looking for books on these particular shelves. I just didn't think about it because I didn't see it. I would also be remiss if I did not acknowledge my 52 books in a 2016 goal as a factor in my neglect of this book. It takes a long time to read an almost 900 page book. That kind of time commitment is not exactly easy to swallow when you're working on a deadline. It's just this kind of thinking that I'm working on breaking away from this year. That's why picking up JS & Mr. N was a pretty easy decision.

I've made a reasonable start with this very thick book. (Even my son commented on how thick it is.) It won't be the easiest book to read on the train or after a long day of walking around Disney parks only because it's kind of hard to hold onto when I'm laying in bed. The story itself is intriguing and enjoyable (at least the 40 or so pages I've managed to read so far). I'm looking forward to finally reading this long neglected novel. I also started a book on my Kindle app. It's also something that I've had for a long time. I bought Boy's Life when it was the Daily Deal back in December 2013 (I didn't have that info handy, I had to look it up in my Amazon account). I read the other book I bought that day, Annapurna, soon after that purchase, but I just keep skipping over Boy's Life. I didn't really know anything about it when I bought it. I figured it was cheap and it's fun to try different stuff. If I hadn't started this whole Book Shelf Zero thing I would probably keep skipping it in favor of more immediately appealing books (like Seveneves). Boy's Life feels like a fun book that will be easy to read when getting out a big fat book like JS & Mr. N isn't the easiest thing to do. After reading the first few chapters, this definitely seems to be the case. This will be a fun and easy book that will pass the time and get me one step closer to Book Shelf Zero. Only 179 more to go.