Isn't this supposed to be fun?

That didn't last long. It was nice to be at 147 for a few days, but I'm already back up to 149 after buying two Culture books, Look to Windward Surface Detail, over the last week or so. This leaves me with a net gain of 10 books for 2018. That's not great, but it's also not horrible. I'm not likely to finish Martin Chuzzlewit (or any other book I own) before the end of the year so that's where I will end up for 2018, at least when it comes to making progress towards Book Shelf Zero.

I will finish at least one more book before the end of the year. I'm close to finishing Skyward, a new book by Brandon Sanderson. It's a library ebook that I'm reading on my Kindle. I did a quick finish of Asymmetry, another library book, to load it onto the Kindle a day before my loan expired. I almost bailed on it, but I read just enough in the give it one more try session that I got sucked into the story. It's not anything fantastic, but it's fun and I want to find out what happens. He acknowledges that this was just a fun side project for him around the massive Stormlight Archives titles so I wasn't expecting anything mind-blowing going in. I convinced my son to get the first book in one of his other YA series so this may be a space that I explore more fully in the coming year.

Asymmetry is the only book that I've finished since wrapping up Hydrogen Sonata. Another book from the 21st Century Canon, another library book. It was a decent enough book, but it just tried too hard. It was full of the serious literary intent that makes too many contemporary books flaccid and unappealing. The first and third sections were very good, but the middle section, a novella later revealed to be written by a character in the first section, was cliche and boring. I'm sure this won't be the last time I feel this way about a book from that list. It was short and I didn't buy it so it's not like it was a huge lose (and a good chunk of the book was worth reading).

I'm getting a bit fatigued by this whole Book Shelf Zero endeavor. It's been a fun challenge, but I'm feeling like I am betraying my reading by making it a means to an end rather than the act of reading being the point of reading a book. My reading has been about crossing a title off of some list rather than being about the pleasure of an entertaining story or the appreciation of a beautiful passage. I set up these little tasks around so many aspects of my life. My Epic Quest spreadsheet that started as a bit of a lark to get me to do ab exercises and get to the gym to lift weights is an uncomfortably central aspect of my life.

I track all of my reading in the Epic Quest spreadsheet. I note my completed books in Goodreads too, but the spreadsheet is where all meaningful activities are recorded. It's where I tracked my marathon training and how many miles I've run, meters I've rowed, how many days I've been to the gym, did ab work, and recorded 10,000 steps. I'm about to finish my third year of recording all of this stuff. All of these activities earn me points. This has been my best points year by far. This approach is effective, but it's not very rewarding. I'm in a race against myself. It gets old after a couple years.

Book Shelf Zero has been effective in it's primary task of making me closely consider every book purchase. I've been close to buying the rest of the Culture series just to have them on hand. There were some good options in today's Daily Deals (the Grant bio and the new Murikami book were very tempting), but I couldn't give up on the idea of Book Shelf Zero. The few dollars that I would save by buying the books on sale weren't worth pushing my to be read number back up above 150. I have a vague recollection of stating that I would be comfortable with about 10 books of progress a year. I would hate to undermine that progress, even if it is making reading feel like a secondary task, than just throw up my hands and splurge on a few books.

If the library had all of the Culture books available as ebooks my progress would have been several books better. Of the 10 books I bought this year, 6 of them are Culture books. The discovery of the ease of getting ebooks from the library was a huge drag on Book Shelf Zero (but a boon to making it through those lists of worthy books on which to spend my valuable reading time). Of the 43 books I have read this year, 23 of them were library books. Of the 20 owned books that I read this year, 6 of them were books that I bought this year. So I read 14 books this year that I owned at the beginning of the year, and most of those I read in the first half of the year.

So I'm chiding myself for reading a series that I really enjoy because I have had to purchase many of the books and lamenting easy, free access to a huge library of books because I have been able to read all kinds of interesting and entertaining books on my phone or Kindle rather than laboring through the books I already own. This is exactly why I'm feeling fatigued by this whole Book Shelf Zero thing. I've had a great reading year, but I have spent much more time reading new stuff rather than plodding through more of Martin Chuzzlewit (an enjoyable read but not as fun as Skyward or something else I picked up from the library). Lighten up and live a little for crying out loud. Stop taking yourself and your silly little challenges so damn seriously!

Finally 147!!!!

After months of having my to be read number bouncing back and forth between 148 and 149, I have finally pushed it down to 147. The Hydrogen Sonata, the Culture book I let my wife talk me into buying when it was a Kindle Daily Deal, got the honor of being the book that gave me my first bit of progress towards Book Shelf Zero in several months. I always go into those Iain Banks books thinking they will be quick reads only to have them go on for weeks and weeks. I thought I would make it through Excession on vacation (I had a week) and failed (despite all the extra reading time I picked up at the beach thanks to crappy weather). The latest Culture book was also something I thought would go quickly only to have it take weeks to read.

The Hydrogen Sonata is the tenth Culture book. This one fits the formula pretty well. A central conflict is set up, the Minds gather to discuss, a human is pulled in, and the event unfold to a neat conclusion. It was a fun read despite repeating a formula very similar to Excession (which is actually referenced, kind of unusual in a series where each book's story is largely independent of what happened in the other books). I'm eager to move on to another Culture book, but I have to finish another of my owned books before I will buy one of the four Culture novels I still need to read. I want to push my to be read number lower still before I make another book purchase.

That next book will be Martin Chuzzlewit. I set this latest attempt to read another Dickens book aside while I read The H Sonata. I have read 20 pages or so in the few days since finishing the Culture novel. It's a bit of a drag at this point, but I'm still really early in the novel (yes, even a quarter of a way through the book I'm still in the early stages by Dickens standards). I know that it will pick up and read quickly once all the scenarios are in place. I just hope I can get there before the year ends. I still have a long way to go in the novel. I expect to have a pretty slow week at work. I have the ebook version of the novel in my work phone. I may use time just sitting at my desk to read a bit. A hundred or so pages read at work would make a big difference in finishing this one by the end of the year. (Thinking about reading a Dickens book at work reminds me of reading the climax of Bleak House on a computer while I was in grad school.)

Asymmetry will be a drag on finishing my Dickens book for this year. This is a much more engaging novel. It's also short and easy to read. The dialogue is so natural and the story moves despite much in the way of detail. The politics are predictably annoying, but the writing is worth overlooking the predictable liberal worldview of the central characters. This is a book I will definitely finish before the end of the year. I'm currently at 42 books read in 2018. I would like to hit 45. We'll see if that happens.

Some progress but life has a bad habit of getting in the way

The library ebooks are too easy to pull into my Kindle library. I can just pile them in there and add new ebooks to the piles of physical books that already taunt me with their many unread pages. Putting holds on these ebooks makes the situation even more complicated. I can't predict when one of them will become available. They just pop into my library totally indifferent to my current reading priorities. Do I read the interesting book I just borrowed with no wait or should I focus on the book I had to wait weeks to finally download?

I've been facing this dilemma all too often over the last few weeks. The Kindle Fire hack, where I can keep reading the book after my loan period expires as long as I don't go back to the home screen, allowed me to finish reading The Lost Colony (book 3 of The Old Man's War series) over the weekend. The delay in reading that was caused by the time I spent reading a book about parenting that I bought after reading some columns by the author online. I finished that book on Monday. Those two books bring my books read up to 39 for the year.

With both of those books finished I faced the rare instance of having no books in progress. After reading a few pages of some book I was able to check out without waiting in line, I started reading that book I mentioned about sleep. I heard an interview with the author on the Joe Rogan podcast. It was fascinating. I looked at the book in the store but wasn't compelled enough to take the step of actually buying it. I only recently thought to see if I the library had the electronic version. The wait wasn't too long, but other books were also becoming available as I was wrapping up The Lost Colony. The unpredictable aspect of when I will get a book that I have on hold makes figuring out what to read that much harder. I had to choose between Why we Sleep and the second book of the Outline trilogy. I have more time with Outline book so I went ahead and started reading the book about sleep.

My reading has taken a back seat to other parts of my life over the last couple of weeks. I ran the Marine Corps Marathon on October 28 (I jotted down some thoughts about that experience and how to do it better but I can't decide if I want to post it here or on my other, mostly neglected, blog). I spent most of the next week focusing on recovering from the marathon. Bedtime took a priority over reading. The marathon was why I had to rely on the Kindle hack. I was focused on the marathon rather than reading in the week leading up to and after my very long run. This week's unusual event was the watch party for a local Congressional candidate. My daughter really wanted to see if her Girl Scout troop leader was going to win. I was very leery about the whole thing, but it was important to her so I decided to do what I could to make it happen. It was mostly successful, the candidate won but we left well before the race was called in her favor, but that late night has impacted me all week. I was falling asleep early last night so I had no chance to read (I'm not going to force myself to stay up to read a book that highlights the need for us to get adequate sleep, especially when I get up early the next day to run). Most of these big life events are behind me so I should be able to get back to more reading in the next couple of weeks.

I have yet to read a page, but I am going to take on Dickens again when I get time to return to a physical book. I have decided to go with Martin Chuzzlewit. It is shorter than Little Dorritt and feels slightly more intriguing. My commitment to this reading choice was reinforced when I was looking over some posts from that neglected blog earlier today. That other blog was started as a way for me to track progress on my New Year's Resolutions. One of those resolutions was to read all of the big Dickens novels. I made that goal in 2010. It's almost 9 years later and I'm still far from realizing it. Realizing Book Shelf Zero will require reading most of those big novels so making progress on one of these goals gets me closer to the other. I've talked myself out of these books for long enough. It's time to take on another one. I hope it's a fairly fast read. I've been sitting at 148 owned books to read for months!

Back to 148...and time to find something new to read

I finished Inversions earlier in the week. It's the fifth book that I've read of the Culture series. The reviews complain that this book wasn't really a part of that series as there are no massive star ships or sentient drones. Those things are part of the story, we just don't see them. We get to experience the Culture from the outside. It's a very clever way to add depth and significance to a sprawling space opera.

I was reading a library ebook while wrapping up Inversions, but my loan period ended before I could finish it.That doesn't mean that I wasn't able to finish the book, Outline by Rachel Cusk, though. I have an old Kindle Fire that has been sitting in a kitchen drawer for years. I've gone back to it after getting a crack in the screen of my phone. I was able to keep reading my expired book on this device right up until this morning when I finished the book. Assuming this wasn't a one time fluke event, this could be a very handy hack for taking some of the pressure off of my library reads. Getting these books from the 21st Century canon via the library has been a great way to expand my reading breadth without buying a bunch of books. I just skimmed the surface of Outline. That book was deep while being well written and a pleasure to read. It's the first of a trilogy. I will make an effort to go deeper on the next two volumes (I already have a hold on book 2).

That additional time could be handy as I start reading the next book in the Old Man's War series. My wait for book 3 wasn't as long as my wait for book 2, but that doesn't mean I want to let my loan period end without finishing the book. These are pretty quick reads so I don't feel like I will have too much pressure to get it done before my loan period ends, but knowing I can go a couple of days over will be helpful if my reading motivation wanes around running my second marathon ever, the Marine Corps Marathon in DC, this weekend.

While my next ebook selection is clear, I'm a bit up in the air about which print book to read next. My first thought was to pick up one of my long neglected Dickens books. Every year I say I'm going to read another of his major works, but they just never seem to rise to the top of my reading pile. Committing to a Dickens book is not a trivial matter. The books are thick and usually start slow. They get very rollicking by the end, but getting to that point can be a bit of a drag. Overcoming this kind of inertia is exactly the point of Book Shelf Zero so perhaps now is the perfect time to make a move on one of these monsters. Martin Chuzzlewit was a big part of The Eyre Affair so I was thinking of reading that one next. Dombey and Son is just so damn long (I made it about half way through that one before bailing on it several years ago) and my previous attempts at Oliver Twist have never gotten very far. Little Dorritt is also an option, but I really have nothing compelling me to read about people in a debtor's prison. Maybe I'll just go with the shorter of Martin Chuzzlewit and Little Dorritt.

Collections

I have added The Horse's Mouth to my collection of completed books. I have moved it from the to be read pile, a place of angst and vexation, to the glory of the read list. Let me gesture to the six hundred and some long list of books that I have read. My virtual book shelf bursts with all kinds of interesting reads. I'm oh so cultured and refined! The Collector also recently joined the read list. It has a nice cameo appearance in an episode of Criminal Minds. That's where I first heard of it. I read another book by the author, The French Lieutenant's Woman, and found that appealing enough. I put a hold on the ebook at the library and waited for my turn to access the file. That time came right as I was finishing up Never Let Me Go. I only had a few days to get through The Collector. I wasn't sure I was going to get the entire book read, but I made a push on the last day of my loan period and made it to the end.

The captive in The Collector, holds the collector (as a general class of consumers of what creatives like her produce) in very low esteem. They fail to adequately feel the power of Art. Possession dominates the experience of the sublime. I couldn't help seeing myself in that characterization. I find myself more interested in the acquisition of a book, replacing the act of reading a book with a deeper appreciate and experience of a novel. The obsessive recording of my reading activities should hold little appeal if I was truly interested in expanding my living experience through books rather than adorning myself with the proxy of a deeper aesthetic experience by listing the titles of all the highly acclaimed books that I have looked at page by page, word by word.

I'm over dramatizing the depravity of my reading experience. I experience far more of the books that I read than anything that I ever record here or anywhere else. The experience of all my books is captured in me. Not every book is captured in an equal degree, but they all leave their mark and add a few more lines of code to the software that is my lived experience. Reading books is no flaunting of wealth or claiming access to some exclusive cultural capital. My lists are just a way to capture a largely ephemeral experience. They also show how my world and experiences have shaped me into the largely conventional person that is just trying to live his life.

I come to the crux of what I really wanted to write a few minutes before I told myself I would go to bed. At least I made it this far. I live in an acquisitive era. Accumulation has been elevated to the highest of virtues. Physical object, varied experiences, or a moment captured in the pixels of a phone are all equally valid ways to acquire meaningful things. The experience has been elevated above the object, but acquisitiveness remains at the core of our meaning making. We turn our back on family and important relationships to pursue degrees and career paths that have attained irrationally high levels of cultural value. Excessive material comfort trumps the psychological riches of deep and meaningful relationships. We seek to find our place in the world by surrounding ourselves with the paraphernalia of opulence rather than nurturing the relationships that bring richness and depth to our experience. Luxury is a sorry remedy for loneliness. The two friends who get to spend a two hour plane ride deep in conversation are having an experience much more profound than the few drinks the business traveler in first class tosses back while writing emails about a project that he wouldn't care about a lick if he wasn't getting paid to take some many flights around the country that the airline rewards him with access to the acquisition of one of the wide seats at the front of the plane.

I'm sometimes not sure if I'm collecting reward points with my reading or spending my time conversing with a friend. It really depends on the book. The Horse's Mouth was a project read. The Collector was hurried due to circumstances, but it was more than just reading the book to say I read it. That's the way I need to look at this project. Every book comes to me in its own way with its own impact. I'll deal with some real dreck, but I will also read books that will impact me long after they are added to the read list (which currently stands at 627 books; 149 owned books waiting to be read (that number will be dropping to 148 soon).

Rule breaking (of a rule I imposed on myself)

I violated my not rule of not buying a book if I'm at xx9, I was at 149 unread owned books on Friday. I checked the Kindle Daily Deal, as I do every day, and saw that The Hydrogen Sonata, book 10 of the Culture series, was on sale for $2.99. That's $7 cheaper than the normal ebook price and several more dollars cheaper than the paperback. I bought the book after asking my wife what I should do. She said it was $7 more to spend at Disney World. I made the purchase.

Thinking about it now, it would have been a mistake for me not to buy the ebook regardless of some silly rule I put in place to rein in my rampant book buying desires. I'm planning on reading all of the Culture books so they are in essence already in my reading queue. They are not available at the library so if I'm going to read them, I'm going to have to buy them. I wasn't pushing into new book reading territory with this purchase. I was filling in a gap that I will have to address in the not to distant future anyway. So I'm back up to 150.

I could have saved myself this ludicrous exercise in maintaining some kind of self-imposed consistency if I could get through The Horse's Mouth. It's taken me over a month to get about three quarters of the way though a 400 page book. It's not a bad book, I would just rather read something else. I'm trying to make sure I read at least 10-15 pages a day, but I'm not always very consistent in meeting that goal. It's particularly hard when I have much more intriguing reads going on my phone. I started Never Let Me Go after finishing Leaving the Atocha Station. I was just checking out the first few pages to see if I should read that or one of my other borrowed ebooks next. I was sucked in before I had a chance to consider anything else. The Horse's Mouth just has nothing to offer that compels me to spend time with it rather than Ishiguro's much more gripping (and better written) story. It's hard to put down Never Let Me Go.

I will probably finish Never Let Me Go well before I finish The Horse's Mouth. If I managed 15 pages a day, a very modest goal that would take me 20 minutes to meet, I would finish The Horse's Mouth in about a week. I need to get that book behind me. I picked it up to get another owned book down before reading Inversions, the sixth Culture book, thinking it would be pretty quick. Big mistake. My book reading pace has been maintained, I've read 4 library books while slogging through The Horse's Mouth, but Book Shelf Zero progress has ground to a crawl.

The rationalization contortions I have put myself through over The Hydrogen Sonata merits a revisit to the real purpose of Book Shelf Zero. Yes, part of it is getting to books that I want to read but have not yet gotten around to, but it's also prevents me from jumping into a reading project by buying a bunch of books only to get distracted from that reading project when the next interesting option shows up. I could have really gone crazy and bought at least 3 books from the 21st Century Canon list while at a used book store on Friday. I found several without looking that hard and they were having a buy 2 get one free offer. That would be 3 new books for less than $10. Book Shelf Zero has become ingrained deeply enough that I relied on that goal to walk out the door empty handed (but with the knowledge that I have a rich source of certain books available for a few bucks).

The battles I set up for myself are getting a bit ridiculous. Don't buy that, read more of this, get to this book before my loan period ends. It's draining!

Another list! (and what I learned about lists and life from a kid who poisoned himself in Alaska; spoiler alert - not much)

Another list of highly acclaimed books showed up in one of my numerous information feeds. This list is the best novels (of the sophisticated artistic type) written this century. I've only read a few of the 100 books listed, and I haven't even heard of the vast majority of them. Contemporary literary fiction is not something I pursue with much vigor, but I'm not averse to picking up a solid literary effort of recent vintage. I've read five of the 100 books in the list. That's much lower than either of the other lists that I'm pursuing. I'm not sure this is a list that I want to pursue to completion. This is more of a source for good books to read kind of list. 

This attempt at the 21st Century Canon does have a nice feature that makes pursuing parts of the complete list a fairly realizable goal. They have the best book of the century, 12 new classics, and then the rest of the list. Reading the top 13 books isn't such a huge task. 

I've already used my new favorite way to grab new reading material, borrowing ebooks from the library, to get a couple of books from the list. I've borrowed a couple and put holds on a couple more. I actually just finished a borrowed ebook. Into the Wild. My one sentence summary, Krakhauer romanticizes Chris McCandless the same way McCandless romanticized Nature. All I could think of while reading the book were the freaks that I knew in college (the only place I would ever encounter people who take life  to such extremes) and how odd and totally out there I found them. I didn't find myself inspired by the thoughts and words of an overly intellectual kid who was conducting some crazy life experiment. I ironically comment on the conventionality of my life from time to time, but I have absolutely zero desire to engage in some kind of crazy minimalist, anti-capitalism kind of life. I'll keep plugging away at my career while pursuing an odd compulsion to read books from random lists that I find on the internet.

Pretty much every book that I read is in pursuit of checking some book off a list that I have in a Google Docs spreadsheet. Into the Wild is actually a rare departure from my pursuit of Book Shelf Zero or some internet list. I guess I'm just too goal obsessed. I look outside myself for meaning and validation rather than sitting calmly and reflecting on my various internal states to find the thing that really appeals to the deep inside version of myself. I should probably sell all my crap, abandon my family, and pursue a life of solitary wondering through the wilds of America. Sounds pretty ridiculous, no? Our current batch of wisdom peddlers would likely condone this kind of meaningless pursuit. We live in a crazy culture that imposes all kinds of crazy expectations on us, expectations that we enthusiastically embrace in pursuit of fame and fortune. The pursuit of status is a total waste of a life, but you don't have to oppose wealth and live totally outside of society to reject the pursuit of status as the central pursuit of life.

My wife read me some stuff she wrote about the objectification of men for a class she is taking. The point of her assignment was about power and how the rising objectification of men shifts the power dynamic between men and women, but it could be read as a reflection on status. Her response was all about status. A bald man is lower status than a man with a full head of hair. All the vigor and vitality suggested by a full head of hair gives an objectified man loads of sexual status. There is a reason why all those boy bands emphasize the fullness and thickness of their hair. (For the record, I am certainly on the more fully coiffed end of the spectrum for men in their early 40s, a fact I must share to ensure that I get my full credit of status.) She discussed older men's delusion that twenty somethings are still attracted to them driving the effort to maintain as full a head of hair as possible. (I will not pursue any balding remedies by the way.)  The objectified man must maintain his youth and vigor to retain the status position of his youth. These desperation these guys exude is pathetic. 

Of course the highest status goes to those who reject the expectations of cultural norms and live life on their terms. A refusal to hide a culturally defined deficit (or being flippant about having a highly desirable status position) carries a power and status all its own. Defining yourself in your terms is the essence of cool. So reading a bunch of books granted social acceptance makes me a bit of a square. My list reading compulsion is nothing more than the transformation of my life in a bunch of checklists and randomly assigned arbitrary tasks. It may look like that, but I'm really just about reading good books. Judge away if you will. I really don't care.

Drifting, not much progress

The Horse's Mouth is this year's Tender is the Night. I spent a month reading that not so very long owned book last year. I'm in the same reading dead zone right now. I'm just not making any progress on any book at the moment. I have The Horse's Mouth going, making very little progress, and The Eyre Affair (library ebook) also consuming some of my reading time. I basically did no reading over the weekend and very little this week. Life stuff is taking a good chunk of my time (spent Saturday night in a hotel and had basically zero time to read) and I've been watching baseball and football games rather than reading. My reading motivation is very much at low tide.

My motivation in general is at a pretty low ebb. I'm going to the gym out of habit more than a real desire to hit the weights, and I'm very much struggling with my marathon training. I'm getting in most of the longer runs, but I cut my long run on Saturday short (mostly to make sure we made it to DC for the Nationals game on time but I was struggling big time for most of the run) and I just flat out decided not to run on Monday morning. I was tired and my knee didn't feel all that great. I was much more consistent in my training last year. I kind of what to attribute my struggles more to the weather than any fitness or performance shortcoming. I've been greeted by muggy mornings pretty much every run. Who knows what conditions I'll be facing on Saturday morning as Florence rolls through. We've been spared a strong impact by the storms shift south, but rain and wind are still very much in the forecast. Twelve miles on the treadmill does not sound very appealing. Regardless of the conditions, I'm just not that excited to get out and run. Maybe a slower paced weekend will give me a chance to rest up and get my mind in a better place. I have to confess that I'm not bursting with optimism that this will be the case.

My motivation woes are closely tied to my long term residence in a pretty deep rut. I've been in what can best be thought of as a nice stable spot for the past few years. I've done a very good job of staying in place. My fitness, weight, and strength are all pretty much holding steady. That could be viewed as effectively resisting the eroding forces of time, but I feel like I'm just failing to really take the actions I need to get some kind of improvements in at least one of these areas of my life. I look at the scale and think that I may just be gaining muscle, but I look in the mirror and see the same of spare tire that I've been saying I want to get rid of for years. My books to read number has gotten smaller, but I don't really feel the progress. I was promoted at work at the beginning of the year, but I've been doing pretty much the same job for the last few years. It's gotten very stale.

I'm not really sure how to bump myself out of this long term equilibrium. I'm happy that I don't have a huge gut, but I'm frustrated by the lack of any positive movement towards a more trim frame. I've gotten no faster, I'm not noticeably stronger, and I still have to resist buying books. It's just all getting so old. Some cooler temperatures might make me feel faster running. Fewer family plans may allow me to get in more regular lifting workouts (which usually result in me being able to put more weight on the bar). Cutting out desserts may help me shed a pound or two. Some progress would be nice, but failure to face the inadequacy of goals like this to make me feel fulfilled may be the real problem.

These few pursuits I just highlighted have me looking for satisfaction and contentment in the future. When I lose the gut, I will be happy with my body. When I can run faster (exact speed not specified), I will be in shape. When I have read all my books, I will feel like I have really accomplished something. My life has been one long series of long term goals with some kind of promised salvation with the goal's accomplishment. Long term goals are fine, but I really need to find satisfaction and contentment with my current status. This is not the first time I've told myself that I need to find a way to focus on my current happiness rather than pursuing future joy, but I really have no idea of how to go about achieving this ideal state of satisfaction.

Long overdue update

I've started several posts updating my reading progress, but I end up getting pulled into other activities before I get a chance to finish them up and get them on the blog. Rather than going into detail about all that I've read since my last update, I will just say that I'm at 149 books to read (after a brief dip down to 148).

I spent most of August reading The Wise Man's Fear. It's a very long book. A fun and engaging read, I never felt like it was dragging despite the mountain of pages, that still took me a long time to finish. I read a couple of other books along with that one. I zipped through The Ghost Brigade to get it read before my online loan period ended. I waited three months to get that book. I didn't want to wait another 3 months to get another crack at it. I finished it on the last day of my two week loan period because I was trying to get all of Excession, my fourth Culture book, read before my vacation ended. I was very close to meeting that goal, I finished at home the day we got back. I also read a narrow philosophy book that I've had for ages. I believe I mentioned it in a previous post. I've kept thinking about Varieties of Presence weeks after finishing it up so it was a worthwhile read.

So I'm steadily working my way through my owned books while managing to avoid accumulating too many more of them. The online library loans have been an essential escape valve for the buying urge. I just finished World War Z. That's not something I would have picked up if it wasn't on that NPR list and it definitely not something that I would have purchased. The wonders of modern technology certainly have their place in an activity as ancient as reading. I have another ebook loan teed up and ready to go in my Kindle library. I may get started on that soon.

I have been reading one of my owned print books. The Horse's Mouth. I bought it at a library book sale more years ago than I can remember. It somehow made it through my book purge a couple of years ago. It's in remarkably good shape for a used library book. I suspect it was never checked out. I pulled off the library tags and it looks brand new. I am right around page 150 so I've built up enough momentum to keep plugging away until the end. It's not the best book, but it's amusing and not a particularly challenging read. It's not overly long either. That's definitely a point in its favor.

My next finished book gets me to my goal of reading 30 books this year. That either means I've read much more than I planned this year or I have been spending less time reading big, fat intimidating books this year. It's actually a bit of both. The books I have borrowed from the library have all been pretty quick reads. Those titles have added some nice bulk to my reading this year. I have also not been doing a nice job of avoiding the really nasty books on my shelf. I've finally gotten around to reading books I've owned for years and years, but I'm still slipping around the really hard stuff. Maybe later this year...

More on the slog

I took my own advice and expanded the time scale of my Book Shelf Zero retrospective. My starting number was 194. After finishing Use of Weapons (a book I bought and quickly read), my current number is 152. My to be read pile has been reduced by 42 books. That's significant progress. I keep a pie chart on the spreadsheet where I track my reading related activities (the spreadsheet has grown far beyond anything I imagined when I started keeping track of these things at the end of 2015). I'm 17.4% of the way to Book Shelf Zero. I'm 4.5 miles into the marathon.

I still have a long way to go. An unstated but very much consciously acknowledged aspect of this blog is delving into what it takes to stick with a project that will take years to complete. While I'm not sure how many people out there are interested in my reading habits, people are typically interested in how to stick to their long term plans. My last post about patience is part of that story. The thrill of accomplishment will never fuel an objective that takes years and years to complete. Something deeper and more meaningful must be present to maintain progress.

My deeper purpose, at least at this point, is getting to the books that have been sitting on my shelf for years. I've hit a few of them this year. A House for Mr. Biswas and The Confessions of Nat Turner are the exact type of books that I had in mind when I set out on this quixotic quest to empty my shelves of books that I haven't read. My recent frustration with the lack of progress is related to my decision to read those books nearly back to back. They both took a long time to read. (Simultaneously reading ebooks from the library was just as big a part of the time to read as the nature of the books.) The commitment required to pick them up and stick with them is what has prevented me from reading them in the first place. My books read list will not expand very quickly when I'm taking on these more intimidating reads. This is just part of the process that I need to anticipate and accept.

I was thinking about the new runner who maps out a training plan for whatever target race they have set for themselves (runDisney events seem to be a popular choice for this type of runner but that could just be because I occasionally take a look at runDisney Instagram posts) while I was running early in the morning last week. The challenge feels like something very much within their ability to overcome when you're looking at a calendar of planned runs. The runs will be hard but manageable. Then you get out there and start running. It's hot, it hurts, and nothing about it is very much fun. All those well laid plans could start to crumble when faced with the battering ram of reality. Big challenges like marathons and reading all of something (a series, an author, some list) are about learning to manage reality's brutality. There will be times when progress is easy and fun, and there will be way too many occasions when progress requires overcoming pain and discomfort beyond imagination.

I'm entering a fun stage in the quest of Book Shelf Zero (I'm also poised to start training for my second marathon, I'm not anticipating very much fun in that process). The already mentioned Use of Weapons is part of that fun progress. This was the best Culture book yet. It only makes me more excited to read the rest of the series (I've already ordered the fifth book, it was very cheap on Amazon while book 4 was a bit harder to obtain). I decided to read A High Wind in Jamaica now that I've finished Use of Weapons. It's another Modern Library Top 100 book. Unlike the other book from that list that I've read this year, Mr. Biswas, A High Wind in Jamaica reads very quickly. It reminds me of Deliverance in the way that it deals with very complex themes but is tense and well plotted. The third of High Wind that I've read was an effortless experience. I expect that I will have it wrapped up by the end of the week.

The only thing that I see getting in my way of quickly finishing High Wind is Flowers for Algernon (well, the Fourth of July holiday could slow me down as well). This is my latest borrowed from the library read. It definitely demands attention. I'm staying disciplined with getting in a bit of physical owned book reading before switching to something borrowed. I can also see myself getting through this one by the end of the week.

A big part of my 42 books read were a bunch of shorter and less challenging books that I owned but hadn't read. I thought I had exhausted my stash of these easy wins, but I remembered one that I have yet to get to while I was shopping for that hard to obtain fourth Culture book. In addition to being harder to purchase than book 5, it is a short story collection. These collections just don't satisfy like a novel. Well, thinking about short stories reminded me of a book I bought with some birthday gift cards several years ago. It's a book called Memory Wall. It sounded good when I bought it (and it sounded good when I just read its description in Goodreads), but I just don't get excited to read short stories. I'm likely picking that up next. I'm eager to push my to be read number under 150. A short book like this will help make that happen.

Once I'm under 150, it may be time to take on one of my really big reading challenges. I have two big challenging lists. There is The List and Everests. These are big, long, challenging books. They will require a serious commitment of time and attention. Now that I think about it, maybe I should save one of these until after my vacation...

Patience

Big projects do not willingly yield big moments. I'm getting impatient for a big moment. I read a book, check it off the list, and move on to the next one. It feels like such a small thing against the much bigger task of making my way through this large and largely arbitrary list of titles. It's not like I'm going to stop reading anytime soon, but the sense of pressure I feel to make progress, to show something for all my work and effort in resisting the urge to just acquire, makes me want to feel like I'm making progress. That sense of getting something done is hard to find when every step is so small relative to the size of the whole journey.

Losing weight is similar. You work, work, work only to see nothing much change on a day to day basis. Looking back over months or years progress is apparent, but the daily living of the process yields so little in perceptible change. The dedication to stick with the process, to keep living the way you want things to be eventually rather than the way things are now requires patience. You have to wait for results to show up and a difference to show itself. Sticking to the plan is not fun when you're stuck in the grind.

The novelty of the Book Shelf Zero challenge is gone. The thrill of getting the list together, seeing the size and scope of the challenge take shape, and making the first few steps against that big audacious goal is an exciting time. I'm well past that stage. It's just an endless list of books to read. I enjoy the books that I've read. I finished American Pastoral last week. Phenomenal book. I'm charging through the 3rd Culture book now. It's fantastic. The way Banks makes cracks about how ancient the relics of the events of the first Culture book sounds like an acknowledgment of the inferiority of Consider Phelbas. He wants it to be cast back in the deep past. I'm happy to leave it back there with him.

I enjoy each book I read as an individual experience, but the experience of the broader reading goals is not as pleasurable. There is just so little progress. I kind of can't help but thinking why bother and what's the point. I could just abandon my plans and pursue whatever feels good, as recommended by people who manage to read over a hundred books a year (although counting a 90 page play as a book is hardly the same thing as a hefty novel), but that surrender to chance and whim is exactly the opposite intention of Book Shelf Zero. Eat whatever feels good will lead to massive weight gain. Reading (and buying) whatever sounds fun and engaging has lead to my current predicament (over a hundred books in my house just waiting to be read). I can't just do whatever. Sure, the numbers of books I read in a year may pop up a bit (I don't think I could ever get to 100, at least not in my current reading patterns and habits), but I wouldn't be reading the books that I want to have read.

Embracing the pointlessness of reading all my owned books just for the sake of reading them is central to the challenge. There is no tangible reward at the end. It's just doing something that requires some dedication and commitment. It's an effort to break the thread of just living life moment to moment and finding a way to link all of those moments and transient interests into something with greater purpose and intention.

Down to 153, and don't really feel like doing anything to make that number any bigger at the moment

I'm 153 books from Book Shelf Zero after finishing up The Confessions of Nat Turner and Flashman and the Mountain of Light. I managed to slip in another of the library ebooks, Old Man's War, between those two print books. 153 is the fewest books I've had left to read in my quest to read all my owned books. It's a satisfying place. I'm so satisfied with reaching 153 that I am not struggling with a desire to run out and buy another book. I know what I want to buy when I'm ready to pull the trigger, The Use of Weapons (book 3 of the Culture series), but I would rather see my to read number at 153 (or lower) than have it bounce back up to 154.

I secretly hoped that this desire to see my to be read number shrink would help me resist the constant temptation to buy a new book. My book buying habit is so strong I wasn't sure that a goal with such a long time horizon would be enough to counter the quick hit that comes with a nice book purchase. It's taken a couple of years, but I think I'm finally there. I have no desire to repeat the book buying binge that I indulged in at the end of 2016. I would feel like all the discipline I enforced on myself over the last several months would be a total waste if I just raced out and loaded up on a bunch of stuff.

The type of books that I've been reading is definitely playing a part in tamping down the book buying cravings. A House for Mr. Biswas, The Confessions of Nat Turner, and that Flashman book are all novels that I have owned for a long time. If I have owned these books for a long time, I have wanted to read them for a long time. It's nice to have actually taken the time to read these books that, while very satisfying, are not exactly thrilling page turners. The sense of mass that I felt when contemplating the number of books that I had on my shelves waiting to be read has slowly receded as I have steadily made my way through my tremendous reading backlog. I have no desire to revisit that cramped and claustrophobic space.

The completion of Flashman and the Mountain of Light (the last of the Flashman books that I own, the last two in the series have been sitting in my Amazon items saved for later for years) left me looking for the next thing to read. I had started a book on my phone, a book that I own, but I wasn't really feeling the desire to pursue that one in earnest. I looked over my shelves and spotted Roth's American Pastoral. That felt like the right thing to read. I was surprised at how quickly this book hooked me and at the pleasure I took in reading it. There is no challenge to keep reading this one. I have given up time to play Breathe of the Wild (a game that still has me engaged while playing it for over a year (although I am getting close to the point of just wanting to beat Ganon and get on to something else)) to keep reading Roth's amazing prose. My progress is slower than I would like as my reading time has been hindered by family activities, but there is no question that I will keep going with this one until I reach the end.

I just happened to pick up this book a couple of days after Roth had died. I didn't know he had died. Somebody following my Goodreads entries would have seen me start reading it and could have assumed that hearing the news of his death had prodded me to start reading what some consider his best book, but there was no conscious connection between his death an me sliding the book off the shelf. I don't know why I avoid Roth's books. I've read a couple of them and have found them highly engaging. I remember reading Portnoy's Complaint in my post-college apartment, but I really have very little recollection of the book (I may have to do a very rare reread). I have Sabbath's Theater on my shelf waiting to be read. That one also has some very high praise. I don't think I will roll right into that one after finishing American Pastoral, but it's become a much more intriguing read than it was a couple of weeks ago.

The pursuit continues, one page at a time...

Fates and Furies - Book 15 of 2018

I read Fates and Furies to spite the reviewers who juts didn't like the characters (that is just the laziest reaction to a book that I can imagine), but it was a surprisingly pleasurable reading experience. The core of this book provides its relevance. The story is nothing inspired and the characters are a bit a flat and cliche. The dynamics of the marriage makes the book worth reading. The whole playwright thing is a joke. A famous playwright? Really? Are there really that many theaters clamoring for stuff from the newest hot thing? Maybe, I have absolutely no interest in the stage so maybe the hot young thing really is famous in the right circles. Our protagonist's name and backstory are utterly ridiculous. The same goes for his wife. But the marriage made the book readable. It's hard to capture exactly what made that part of the book work, but the way two lives were joined and became something greater than two individual lives captures something very real. The rest of the plot is just embellishment. They were better together then either of them could have been alone. That idea, and the reasonably good writing, propelled this book to critical acclaim. Marriages matter. This book puts that feeling into words.

I did not buy this book. It came to my attention through the Kindle Daily Deal. In years past I would have bought it on intrigue alone, but I'm no longer so quick to surrender to intrigue. I read it as an ebook from the library. It's not part of any list and it gets me no closer to Book Shelf Zero, but the book snagged me from the first few pages. It was fairly short and pleasurable to read. I'm happy to have read it. I'm glad I didn't buy it.

Fates and Furies is book 600 in my Goodreads list. I was hoping that book 600 would be some long held book that I've taken forever to getting around to reading (like The Confessions of Nat Turner, which I have finished but haven't gotten around to blogging about yet), but it was this random book that I just happened upon. I added yet another book from my past to extend that list another digit past 600 earlier today. I had not yet noted that I read The Autobiography of Malcolm X in my distant reading past. I'm pretty sure it was late in high school. It may have been early in college. I don't remember all that much of it, but I read it during an impressionable part of my youth so I'm sure it tweaked me a bit in some impossible to rediscover way.

I have been extending my list through audiobooks, The Godfather and The Restaurant at the End of the Universe, and other library books that are also on one of my lists (Old Man's War, I'll get around to commenting on this one eventually, after Nat Turner of course). I thought I was done with library books for awhile, but a title that I put on reserve was automatically borrowed today. My plan was to read one of my owned ebooks. I even read a few pages of one of them yesterday. I may set that aside to read this new book. Maybe I'll try reading them both while also reading Flashman and the Mountain of Light, an effort that was strongly inhibited by Old Man's War. I like seeing my to be read pile shrink (especially as I have decided to not buy another book until I get at least one more book read), but the quick and entertaining library reads are so appealing.

The Player of Games - Book 14 for the year

Reading these Culture books by borrowing them electronically from the library feels like the just right way to obtain and consume this series. Instantaneous electronic access is the way things work in the Culture. I have to use a clunky cell phone to get access to the system that delivers the book, there would be some kind of sentient drone ready to instantly handle my spoken request in the Culture, but avoiding the hassle of the physical book itself is the way things get done in that far, far advanced civilization. The Culture is so advanced that organisms aren't really organisms any more. They are more like biological machines than beings subject to the accidents of genetics and biological systems. Anatomy is tuned and tweaked and optimized to provide just what the person wants or needs. Gender is fluid, the endocrine system has been souped up to manufacture any combination of drugs to change mood and mind, and lost body parts can be regrown or existing body parts modified to provide superior performance. Life in the culture is one big party. Tedious and dreary jobs seem as antiquated as illness and disease. There is no money so people just do what they like. You pursue what gets you going. The Player of Games, this guy Gurgeh, spends all his time playing (and winning) at every kind of game the universe can imagine. They live on manufactured space stations built at epic scales in fully automated houses that meet every desire and whim.

This utopia is the opposite of Terminator-like visions where robots remove humans from the mix. In this instance, the robots seems to nurture and deeply care for the biological machines. It's almost like the biological machines are the pets for the drones and other self-aware mechanical beings (which all carry the moral and legal status of a person). People in the culture are as far removed from a natural environment as possible, but they are deeply invested in pursuing the physical pleasures that come with being an animal. There's plenty of sex and drugs and drinking and food. They are all genetically fixed to be in great shape and stay young and fit. They can basically do whatever they want with no fear of consequences. The Culture is communism perfected. People can't run a centrally planned economy, but nearly omniscient Minds are able to manage the required complexities with aplomb. Each person is able to give the best of their ability. Gurgeh gets manipulated into using his gifts to further the aims of the Culture.

Damn, I just realized that these books are hugely leftist. The philosophy and morality of the Culture is very much the logical extension of conventional liberal ideologies. The first book had a planet that had been totally destroyed by a war. Stupid generals killed everybody. The Player of Games was centered around a game used by an empire that tortures, oppresses,and subjugates different sexes to maintain its power and structure. And to think I was planning on giving a discourse of how separated we've become from our biological and natural roots. I'm not very liberal in my political positions. I never really challenged or questioned the idea of the good life and success when I was a kid. I very much desired achieving success and distinction within the system as it existed. Well, I'm still pretty much following that pattern with a slightly higher awareness of the absurdity that is life in a corporation. I'm definitely no rebel or extremist of any sort. I'm aware of and recognize the short comings in our system, but I don't see the point in making a big deal about it. I would rather just live my life the best I can within the bounds of the current system. I have no desire to foment change. At least not at a societal level. I'm all about change in my personal space.

Taking an idea to its logical extremes, like Banks has done with The Culture, certainly builds interest. A deep focus on one or two issues seems to be the way people get attention for their endeavor. People are far more likely to read about some crazy adventure than follow somebody's quest to read all the books that they have dropped money on over the year. Going deep into some common interest, video games, a sport, a team, any kind of hobby, gathers like minded people to you in some effort to share in or learn from your experience. People want to know what they can get from you. What secret knowledge can you share that will give me an edge? Teach me something! Show me something I didn't know! Give me access to the parties and events that my lowly social status prevents me from accessing! Isn't that what the Kardashians are all about? Opening the doors of riches and celebrity to the prying eyes of the heathen public? There are all kinds of people out there living their life differently than I live mine. Some of these people are fictional, like our friend Gurgeh, the Player of Games, some of them are real people showing a curated and largely fictional depiction of their life, and others are sharing something real about their experience. The more extreme your little life experiment, the more attention you will garner.

This little project could be about helping people find books to read. It could be about helping people build a reading habit. It could be about me and what I think (using whatever book I'm currently reading as a starting point for some maybe slightly related diatribe), or it could just be me recording my reading activities just for the hell of it. I'm thinking I may just do it for the hell of it.

In that vein, I quickly switched to this book Fates and Furies after finishing The Player of Games. It's another ebook from the library. It was the Kindle Daily Deal last week. I would have just bought it a couple of years ago, but seeing that to be read number go up cancels out the small joy I get from buying books. Getting it from the library feels like I'm cheating the system somehow. It's also free, easy, and requires no commitment. I read a few pages to see what all the fuss was about, it was highly lauded when it came out a couple of years ago, and was instantly hooked. I'm racing through this one. I would be going even faster but I'm making sure I keep making progress on The Confessions of Nat Turner as well. I think I see where this Fates and Furies book is headed. I really hope I'm wrong. I guess I'll know soon enough.

Virginia at War, 1862 finished, 154 to go

I won this battle. Well, it was really more of a skirmish. I didn't need to use many resources to take care of this one. No matter the scale (it wasn't hard at all, it was a very pleasant experience), the final result is one less book on my to be read pile. I also picked up a bit more of the atmosphere and experience of the Civil War. This series of books does a nice job of getting behind the battle fronts to recount the experience of the people not engaged in combat. The Civil War evolved into a total war. The people involved didn't realize that victory would require the complete dedication of each nation's industrial output, part of this book tracks how early efforts to supply soldiers were strained by the Army's failure to procure the total output of Virginia's limited fabric manufacturing capabilities. The level of cohesion and commitment war demands from the population is so easy to overlook in the flood of detailed accounts of battles and military strategy. It takes the resources of a nation to enable those military maneuvers.The people had to believe in the cause and justice of the war. An indifferent population will not carry a nation to victory.

The essentially total breakdown of mass culture and the sense of a national identity has probably made total war a near impossibility for us now. We are slowly creeping into such highly curated and customized cultural niches that a shared sense of anything is gradually eroding. The sense of our individual importance dwarfs anything the nation may need. Even the fixation on Trump derives more from the perceived threat he presents to the continued evolution of particular cultural trends than any sense that he is altering the fundamental tenets or principles of our shared notion of The United States. The simple desire to bring back the sense of the United States as a unified nation with its central role of spreading democracy and freedom to the rest of the world is a threat to numerous sects and niches groups that fill people with purpose and meaning. Progressive politic's excessive focus on the individual and all the superficial traits that make us different, and how those differences have been used to exploit and oppress, has been a central driver in breaking all of us up into distinct, and rival, mini-cultures. A nation of rival mini-cultures will never coalesce to support total war.

My newest front in the war that is Book Shelf Zero is The Confessions of Nat Turner. I have the 25th anniversary edition of the novel. The book was written over 50 years ago. (Translation, I've had this book for a long time.) I was wise to read the afterword before plunging into the novel itself. The origins and history of the novel with its many years of controversy was good to know before I started the story. I could say that the story definitely feels like a white man putting himself in the place of a black slave, but that could just be the influence of that afterword. Any book written now would be an imagined experience of slavery. Nat's arc and descent into rebellion feels very contrived. The overwhelming power of the writing pushes these concerns very much to the margin though. Styron creates powerful images and scenes. He puts you right into the Tidewater plantation. The book is moving along smoothly enough. I've been splitting my reading time between Nat's story and another book (which I recently finished) so the going is a bit on the slow side. I would like to have this done by the end of the month but I'm not sure that's going to happen.

Dragonflight - Book 12 of the year

I've had my fill of Anne McCaffery. The book was average at best. I have read some excellent books that were much lower on that NPR list. This one was a solid dud. The principle components of the story are solid, but the execution was just so impatient and poorly developed. Events just happen. There is very little build-up or suspense. The big reveal of why so many of the other places are empty is satisfying, but the payoff is less than it could have been. It's all stiff and impatient and just poorly crafted. At least it was short.

Dragonflight marks the 42 NPR Sci Fi/Fantasy book that I've read from the list. That's the same number of Modern Library Top 100 that I have read. I've read 7 of the NPR books this year. I've read 1 of the Modern Library books. I would guess that I have a better chance of finishing the Modern Library list first. There are still 215 books on the NPR list for me to read (lots of series in that list). Side note, I already own 1 of those books. Just 1. Dragonflight aside, I've been pleased with the books on both of the lists so I have no reservations to keep using them as a source of solid reading material.

I should finish Virginia at War, 1862 by the end of the week. A family trip to DC for some baseball and museums may interfere a bit with my reading, but that's not a bad thing. Some desperately needed sleep may cut into my reading time tonight, and my kids being home with me in the morning could slow down my before work reading progress. I guess that leaves Tuesday night as the only real chunk of reading time before the trip. Well, maybe I will be able to read a bit in the hotel room.

A House for Mr. Biswas complete - 155 remain

It took me almost 2 months, but I have finished reading A House for Mr. Biswas. This book creates a sense of character and place that far exceeds the sum of the words that fill its many pages. The sense of place plays a critical role in the story. This is not just a story about the events of a man's life. It's the story of a life. Where things happen proves just as important as what happens. This isn't much of a stretch to make as chapter titles are mostly where Biswas happens to live at that point of his story. His story could not happen as it does anywhere other than the Hanuman House (which I can finally read without thinking of Baljeet as Hanuman Man) or Green Vale or any other place on Trinidad. The power of this novel is undeniable if subtle. The novel's action lies within Biswas. It's not about thrilling adventure or a gripping plot full of suspense and intrigue. It the slow unfolding of a life and all the limits and struggles that come with living our allotted place. I wasn't ready to read this novel when I bought it over 15 years ago. Life needed a chance to buffet me around a bit. I empathize with Biswas and understand his struggles. He's easy to dismiss as weak and ineffectual, but in dismissing him, we would be all too eager to dismiss so much of what each of us struggle with every day. 

It took me a few days to settle on which book to read after finishing the Naipaul. (Brief aside, I fully intend to purchase another Naipaul book in the not too distant future. A Bend in the River will likely be that purchase. I would like to take a look at it first, but it's not in stock at any of the B&N locations near me. I could borrow it from the library as an ebook without too much hassle, but I kind of like the process of going to the store and looking at it. I enjoy the process of buying the book (obviously, that how I ended up with so many of them to read!). The failure of any retail location to figure out how to stock books that appeal to a limited audience is a real bummer. Maybe the existence of the limited audience is the real downer. Anyway, this is the kind of situation that heralds the demise of the mass book seller. Well, the end of mass everything is the real trend. Books are just a marginal enough product that it's dying faster than some other industries. Long live the niche! At least online resources will provide a way for me to keep getting books like this. Opening a box just isn't the same as going to the store.) After spending 7 weeks with a single physical book, I was not eager to engage with another several week long reading project. A field trip with my daughter to a Civil War battlefield had me in an historical frame of mind for the last month or so. After some looking around on my shelves, I found the Virginia at War books. I have four of the five volumes (only 1865 remains to be purchased), but I have only read the first one, 1861. The books are a series of chapters on different aspects of the war with an exclusive focus on events in Virginia. Each one of the volumes is pretty slender, not quite 200 pages including notes, with the final chapter of each being an excerpt from the diary of a woman who lived in Fairfax during the war. These skinny little books on the Civil War were a perfect fit for my current reading needs. 

So Virginia at War, 1862 is moving along smoothly. Each chapter is the right length to be read in a single session so the book moves with a nice cadence. I'm very familiar with the events of the Civil War in Virginia in 1862 (that is really the only period and theater of the war that I really know anything about) so the books move quickly. The chapters focus on events outside of battles and generals. The topics are minor but provide very interesting context for the larger events that I already know a bit about. There are always a few pages of notes at the end of each chapter so I get some bonus pages to record in Goodreads with each one I finish. I've read three chapters in as many days. I should finish the book next week. 

I'm also making nice progress with Dragonflight, yet another NPR 100 book that I borrowed from the library. I'm not very impressed with this one. It's decent enough, but it's not very well written. It's short, and I'm about 3/4 of the way to the end. I will finish it this weekend.

I'm tired of being stuck around 155 books to read so I'm going to hold off on buying anything for a little while. I really need to pick a harder ebook that I already own to take on while reading something engaging in the physical format. I have some plans for how to make that happen. We'll see if I follow through.

Lost in Shangri-La

I have been putting Lost in Shangri-La aside for years as it felt like it would take too much effort to read.  I should have known that a book given away for free with iBooks would be an entertaining and require very little effort. This book was a fun read with very little in the way of resistance or challenge. It wasn't anything particularly profound or paradigm shifting, but it was an engaging way to spend a few hours.

Those few pleasant hours allowed me to get my to be read number down to 155. Unfortunately it popped right back to 156 when my plan to delay the arrival of my latest purchase, The Destructive War, was thwarted by Amazon's efficient supply chain. I skipped two day delivery in favor or a later delivery date (and the $1 discount on a digital item that was offered with the slower delivery), but my book was shipped with a phone case that I ordered for my son. Oh well, I had good intentions. I guess I'm just left to be stuck at 156 for months and months.

I could get off of 156 if I could just finish A House for Mr Biswas. I started this book in early February. It's the middle of March and I'm still a touch over 100 pages from being finished. It's not that this is a bad book or a real drag to read, it's neither of those things. I've just been reading other books instead (like the aforementioned Lost in Shangri-La). As the end of Mr. Biswas gets closer I'm more inclined to read it. It helps that I haven't been immediately drawn into a different book on my phone. I started Dragonflight (yet another ebook I've borrowed from the library), but getting through the indirect description of what's happening and some less than easy to keep track of names has made the early going on this one a bit slow. The basketball tournament has also been distracting me from reading. 

It's fitting that I'm spending weeks and weeks on Mr. Biswas as I've had it for years and years. I bought it soon after V.S. Naipaul won the Nobel Prize back in 2001. I read another of his books, The Enigma of Arrival (it was called his masterpiece in the Nobel citation so I'm not surprised I started with that one), and was engaged enough to try another. I was thrown off by the Indian characters in Trinidad and wasn't able to find a drive to read that book amid my flurry of book buying activity. (I bought loads of books when I had no money.) I bought it at Border's to give a sense of how long I've had it. I've said it before and I'll keep saying it, books like this is what Book Shelf Zero is all about. It's hard to overcome the inertia of a book sitting on my shelf for years.

A House for Mr. Biswas has had a long residence on my shelf, but there are others that have been waiting longer. As best I can determine from my memory of when I bought my books, a memory that is strangely vivid, For Whom the Bell Tolls is my longest held book. I think I bought it while I was still in high school. I've tried reading it a couple of times but I quickly lose interest and move onto something else. Hemingway has never really made the earth move for me, I've only read The Sun Also Rises and I almost gave up on that a couple of times, but I will eventually make it through this piece of propaganda. Now that I've recognized it as my longest held book, maybe I will have to get to it sooner than I had planned (or maybe I should save it for the book that brings me to Book Shelf Zero?). 

The Princess Bride, The Martian Chronicles: Book 8 and 9 of 2018

I don't really know what to expect when I pick up one of these NPR top 100 books. I have seen The Princess Bride movie (usually just bits and pieces, I think I may have sat and watched it from beginning to end once). I expected that the book would be the romance and adventure parts of the movie. I had no clue that the parts of the movie where the book is being read to Fred Savage was such a key part of the book itself. The clever device that the book is an abridgment of some larger classic work is very central to the story. That device highlights how much we bring to the creation of these stories. These books and the movies made from them do not exist in isolation. We bring all of our experiences with us. The authors bring the (very detailed) blue prints. We do all the decorating.

I had absolutely no idea what to expect when I started reading The Martian Chronicles. I knew it was on the short end. That was it's primary draw. I didn't like it very much after the first couple of chapters, but once I got the hang of the structure and the larger story being told, the book was more captivating. The end came as a total surprise. I had no idea how big the themes would be. This is a book that tells us more about ourselves than the characters that fill its pages. There are big themes in this book. This is not the only time that I've seen Mars used as a way to symbolize the isolation of the individual. There could be some academic material to chew on there.

While I'm talking about the unexpected in books that have been made into movies, I have to mention I Am Legend. I listened to the audio version. The movie does this book no justice. The movie's safe ending is nothing compared to the profound climax of the book. The beginning is so visceral and real. It's amazing to me that it was written in the 50s. It felt so real and now, even with the events being described as taking place in the late 70s. The middle was a bit of a drag, but the ending had a power that took me totally by surprise. It's definitely not Hollywood. That's what makes it so good. (I just realized that I, Robot, the last book I wrote about, was also made into a movie starring Will Smith.)

My reading of A House for Mr. Biswas carries on in the background. I'm slowly inching my way towards the end of that one. A week of concentrated reading would get me to the finish line (or very close to it), but I keep splitting reading time with whatever ebook I have going on at the moment. I tore through a bunch of library books on my phone. Now I'm working on one of my owned books. It's not as long as I thought (there are a bunch of notes and other materials at the end) and it's a pretty decent read. I will have more to share after I finish that one up in the next day or two. It will be nice to scratch one more title from my list of to be read books! Only 156 to go (I've been on that number for way too long)!

I, Robot - Book 7 of 2018

As I'm not making any headway on Book Shelf Zero at the moment, I will just note my progress towards my goal of reading 30 books in 2018. I'm crushing that goal at the moment thanks to borrowing ebooks from my local library. The trend will continue as I'm a bit over halfway through The Princess Bride. Both I, Robot and The Princess Bride are books that I would not have been very likely to pick up if not for my efforts towards reading all the NPR 100 books and the ease with which I was able to acquire them. They are also both relatively short books that are fun and a pleasure to read. They zip right by. I'm not achieving much progress towards Book Shelf Zero, but I'm also not buying any books. I was shopping for books earlier this week and just couldn't see the point in making a purchase. I'm content to keep plowing through the NPR list by borrowing books from the library while slowly picking my way through some physical books that I already own.

I, Robot was a decent enough book. The inter-related short story format would have worked really well for Consider Phlebas. The book was surprisingly moral. Sure, robots were the center of the story, but the moral system used to ensure that robots don't dominate humanity is really the crux of the book. Every story explored the implications of such a well-defined and impossible to violate moral code. The book was more about exploring the edges of such an absolute code than fantasies of life with machine slaves. This book will likely get more pop if any of these promised autonomous cars or other robot technology ever actually become a reality. There are plenty of interesting questions to think through.

I've been making steady progress on A House for Mr. Biswas while I've been tearing through science fiction ebooks. This is a surprisingly engaging novel. It's not exactly thrilling, but the quality of the writing is so high that it's a pleasure to read. I have a goal of reading 15 or 20 pages a day. It will take me a few weeks to make it to the end at this pace (I'm about a third of the way through the book now), but I'm not so worried about the elapsed time. I will use whatever little tricks I need to make it through my owned books. If it means reading them around easier fare, then so be it. A finished book is a finished book whether it takes me a couple of days or a couple of months to get to the end.

2001, Consider Phlebas done, still at 156

2001: A Space Odyssey took me to places that I had not anticipated. I have seen (and been mystified) by the movie. This book lays out the story behind the visual and audio power of the movie. The movie wouldn't be nearly as powerful without this very solid story behind it. The book does more than merely provide a strong skeleton to some classic cinema. The scale of the Universe defies our understanding (just as much as what happens down at the electron level), but this book gives us a little peak into the vastness of creation. It's compelling and wondrous and awe inspiring. Definitely a book worth reading.

I'm much more lukewarm on Consider Phlebas. The entire book is a series of unfortunate events for the Changer. The different sections of the book are solid in their own way, but the effort to string them together into some kind of cohesive whole was not convincing. The book would have been better as a collection of loosely connected short stories (which it kind of is in its own way) than a single novel. It's the first book in the Culture Series. We'll see if Banks got better at this kind of writing by the time he really got going with this style of writing.

These two books bring me up to 6 books for the year. I'm happy with this pace. I'm still at 156 books to read as these were both library books, but they were also both entries on the NPR Top 100 Sci Fi list. That brings me up to 36 of those titles completed. That's only 5 fewer than the 41 books of the Modern Library Top 100. I'm currently reading a book from each list (I, Robot and A House for Mr Biswas) so there will be progress on both of those lists very soon. I'm borrowing I, Robot from the library (as an ebook, which is just way too convenient) so that does nothing for Bookshelf Zero, but A House for Mr Biswas is a book that I've had for a long time. It's old enough that it has a Border's tag on the back!

I haven't had a particularly strong urge to buy anything. Well, it's more accurate to say that the desire to get my to read number down is stronger than my desire to acquire a new book. The library ebooks are helping with the urge to buy. I can acquire the books and get through them quickly. This pattern may hold until I finish Mr Biswas.

The Hero of Ages - 156 to go

If I had only known! The Mistborn trilogy ends in fantastic fashion. I'm not just talking about the conclusion of this last novel. The entire book was outstanding.I have been cheating myself by putting it off for years. Yes,t it was a little on the long side, but all those pages were totally worth it. I closed the book feeling very satisfied. That's high praise because so many exciting books end with a whimper. Endings are where Sanderson excels. I've read some reviews of Oathbringer, another of his books that I'm slowly making my way through on Audible, and the ending of that book is highly praised. So The Hero of Ages goes back in the box with its other two friends, I get to mark another title from the NPR sci fi list (I'm up to 35 completed), and I have reduced my to read pile by one more book to get it to 156.

I'm on track to knock a couple more books off that NPR list in the next week or two. My to read pile will not change though. I'm deep enough into my ebook borrow from the library that I will do my best to finish it before my loan period ends on Wednesday (or is it Tuesday?). This will be my primary book for the next several days. I think I can finish it this week. My other library book, 2001: A Space Odyssey, may keep me from it though. I read a few pages of that this morning before heading to work. It's going to be a very fast read. It's short and compelling. I've seen the movie. I was entertained but confused. I've read that the book clarifies some of the confusion. We'll see.

I'm well ahead of my book reading pace of last year. I was still days from finishing my second book of the year at this point last year. I've already finished 4 this year. Those other two books are going to go quickly so I will have 6 books before too long. That's book a week pace again. This rapid progress tells me it's time to pick up something a bit more intimidating. I've had The Wings of the Dove on my nightstand for many months. This may be the time to take that on. Ulysses is there too, but I'm getting very close to (officially) abandoning my first attempt on that one.

I have unlocked a book to buy. Oh, the temptation is so strong. It's also nice to have the freedom to get a book if i so desire. I'm going to take my time and enjoy this. I may even wait until I have unlocked two books. That way I can buy one but still have the option to buy another if the right target comes along.

It's a process, a long one

Bookshelf Zero will take years for me to realize. At 20 books a year (that would be a net number of books read minus books purchased), it will take me 8 years to finish. Let's face it, as I'm only left with really challenging books, my pace will slow down considerably. This is really more of a lifetime kind of quest.

Finishing either of the lists I mentioned last time, the Modern Library Top 100 or the NPR SciFi/Fantasy list, will also require years of reading. I read 3 Modern Library books last year. I have 59 titles left on that list. Excluding the multi-volume entries, I have 20ish years to go if I'm going to complete that list, at least at last year's pace. The Science Fiction list will take even longer. How much longer? A decade at least. It's taken me 2.5 years to read the Mistborn trilogy. That's just one entry on that mammoth list. How long will it take me to get through some of the huge series?

These are goals that are about the journey. The destination isn't the point. Exploring books that I would never have thought to read is the point. It's nice to see progress, but this is not something that I can rush. I'm looking forward to getting to under 150 books to achieve Bookshelf Zero. I will celebrate the milestones, but I will not simply abandon the ultimate goal because it's taking a long time. I have to be persistent, consistent, and patient. I will get there. It's going to take some time. There is no need to hurry or rush. I just need to stick to the process.

I'm sticking to the process through Mistborn 3. This is easily the best of the Mistborn books. This is mature Sanderson. He was still finding his voice in the first two volumes. He's all there in this one. I'm reading it quickly, but this is not a rush to just have the book finished. I'm desperate to see how it all turns out! I will be there soon. I expect that I will be transfixed with the big conclusion Wednesday night. That's not so good as I get up early to run on Thursday, but whatever. If I do finish on Wednesday, that means I spent two weeks to the day reading the book. That's pretty much what I expected when I started the book.

So it's about finding pleasure and a rewarding experience as I slowly chip away at my piles and piles of books. Enjoy the books I read. Keep my buying under control. Remind myself that this is not a short term endeavor. This is a lifestyle. I make a few pages of progress everyday. Those small steps add up after awhile. The number of books to read will get smaller and smaller every year. Well, assuming I don't go on a huge buying binge anyway.

Flashman complete, Mistborn 3 underway, lists and more lists

I was planning on writing some thoughts about my experience as a white, straight, married man in contemporary culture, but that feels really hard so I'm going to write about books instead. Flashman and the Dragon has been slain. The first two thirds of this one was entertaining (as all Flashman books are), but it was also a touch dry with lots of dialogue dedicated to putting all the players in their place and detailing the actions of different armies. The last third was the opposite of that. The domino rally that Macdonald spent all that time setting up fell together beautifully. (Come to think of it, Flashman has lots to say about masculinity.) I have the next Flashman book on my shelf, where it will stay for the next few weeks at least. Flashy is best consumed in moderation. The books are also very reasonable in length (about 300 pages) and highly readable so they are good palate cleansers between weightier (either in sheer heft or density) titles.

With my third book of the year complete (and my unread pile back down to 157 books), I've moved onto the third and final book of the Mistborn trilogy. These have not been my favorite books. I'm not sure I would have even read books 2 and 3 after reading book 1 if I had not bought the entire trilogy as a boxed set. Well, I have this minor goal to read all of Sanderson's books so I can maybe start to see his Cosmere thing come into play as he continues to churn out books at a crazy rate so I probably would have read them eventually. Regardless, I started this book with some trepidation. It's over 700 pages. The first two books dragged for a bit before ending on a much stronger note. Getting through that draggy early part is what has kept me from reading book 3 for so long. Well, 255 pages in there is no dragging. The action gets going right from the first page. I didn't realize how much I had forgotten from the last book, but a very convenient summary of book 2 in the back of this one has given me the reminders I need to reorient myself to the story. I'm all in on this one. It should be a fun read.

Finishing the Mistborn series will be another title I can mark as read in the NPR Top 100 Science Fiction / Fantasy list. I spent way too much time entering all the book/series into the spreadsheet I use to record all of my reading activities. I wanted to keep track of how many of those books/series I have read. I have a shelf for this list in Goodreads, but all the series make it hard to know how many of the 100 I have read. The answer is a third. I have finished 34 of the 100 titles. Now, I had to read 69 books to achieve that number. The Malazan books, all 10 of them, are part of that list. The Wheel of Time, which is a 14 book series, is also on the list. There are plenty of single books on that list too. I guess this list (and the Modern Library Top 100 novels) are kind of side quests to my main quest of Book Shelf Zero. Curiously, I think I've read most of the NPR list books that I own. Yes, other than this Mistborn book and the second Kingkiller Chronicles book, I have read all the sci fi/fantasy books that I own on that list. I have a couple of audiobooks that I haven't gotten to yet, but it's nothing like the 17 Modern Library books that I own but have not read. Let's face it, it's more fun to read an adventure in space than an examination of manners!

The contradiction of having a side quest that requires me buying more books when my stated purpose is to read all of the books I already own is not lost on me. I will keep buying books. The challenge is to avoid buying books on impulse. A perfect example of a potential impulse purchase came up this afternoon. A blog I read did a mini-review of a new book. That book just happened to be today's Kindle Daily Deal. Two years ago I would have bought it. It's only $2, what is there to lose?! Having lists like these give me a place to focus my desire to buy. The Sci Fi list is particularly promising place to look for fun books to buy. The entire list is around 315 books. All of those series really add up. Just one entry on the list, number 99, the Xanth series, includes 40 books. There are over 200 books for me to choose from. Well, that's not entirely true. A few of the series have omnibus editions. The Amber Chronicles, number 40, is a good example of this. The series is 10 books, but they are not very long. A single book containing all the novels is less than $20.

Now, the challenge with a book like that is how to account for it in my tracking of unread books. Is it one book or 10? I could see reading one novel from the series, putting the omnibus aside and reading something else, coming back to the next novel in the omnibus, and so on until the series (and the omnibus book) was finished. Would I count each novel from the omnibus as a book read on Goodreads? That would mess up my annual book tracking. I guess I could count them as borrowed books until I finished the 10th novel. It would get (unnecessarily) complicated.

I could try this approach to tracking the individual novels in a book that contains an entire series using some books I already own. I have the Alexandria Quartet in my phone. It's a 4 book series. The entire series is over 800 pages, but each book is only a couple hundred pages. I'm not reading anything on my phone at the moment (all my effort is with Mistborn), but I could start reading Justine, the first book, to see if my new system will work.

Getting to Yes with Yourself - 157...for now anyway

I wrapped up my first book that I both started and finished in 2018. I regretted buying Getting to Yes with Yourself after picking it up as a Daily Deal sometime in 2016. I read the intro and a bit of the first chapter and it just felt dull and inane. It was formulaic, thin, and a waste of time. It's still formulaic and thin, but it wasn't a waste of time. Learning to observe my feelings without judgement marks some pretty serious progress for me over the last year or so. I would lash out when threatened before I learned to just deal with my feelings. Lashing out only made the people around feel bad. Being vulnerable and authentic is difficult. You have to put so much on the line when you're honest about your feelings. I was taught to hide my emotions and coerce people to accommodate my emotional needs. That approach creates nothing but limits. It limits your opportunity to grow, it limits how deep your relationships can be, and makes it harder to get what you really want. This quick little book is a good reminder about being kind to yourself while being vulnerable and authentic. It's nothing life altering, but it's a nice reminder of a better way to live.

Two books down in 2018. I'm pretty deep into Flashman and the Dragon so it's looking like that will be number 3 for the year. I very much enjoy the Flashman books, but I've found that I get bored with them if I try to read too many in a row. I did two in a row a couple of years ago. The books follow the same basic plan. Flashman gets himself involved in an extreme situation (with deep historical significance) by pursuing a woman. The rest of the book is how he extricates himself from this dire predicament. They're very well done. Fraser maintains the Flashman identity in every line of the book. They're fun and entertaining in their own very unique style. I own another one with two more left in the series. It's a series I will definitely complete, eventually.

I finally bought a book earlier this week. I decided to go with A High Wind in Jamaica. It's a shorter book, 250 pages or so, and a Modern Library Top 100 book. I resisted the urge to buy a collection of three McMurtry books. I have a few of these collections in my to read pile. That would just be one more long book that I have to wade through. I decided it would be better to get something that doesn't make me cringe when I scroll by it in my Goodreads shelf. I tried to be clever and skip the Prime shipping so I could get Flashman finished before my new book arrived. I would not count it as bought until it was delivered. That would give me time to extend my book buying limit by another book (and get me a $5 credit for Amazon Now). I ended up outsmarting myself. I ordered my book Tuesday morning, opting out of the Prime shipping (delivery date was a week away, plenty of time to read Flashman). I ordered some books for my wife that evening, but this time I requested Prime shipping. Well, they ended up combing those orders for shipping. My book was delivered with my wife's books today (Friday). I discovered a way to hack the Amazon system, but I also gave myself a way to get a new book sooner. Oh well, I could always have some self-discipline and not buy a book for every two that I read.

I laid down some preliminary reading goals for 2018 this afternoon. I have had fairly ambitious reading goals (beyond reading a certain number of books) in the past, but I have never completed all of them. I will pick a group of books that I want to read. The group usually represents a mix of reading ambitions. Bucket list books like War and Peace usually show up. I try to get some of my series in there (Mistborn has been in every goal, I may actually read the last book this year), and I try to dig deep into my pile to find something that hasn't really been on my radar recently. I have a Mozart book that was one of my free books when I joined the History Book Club years ago. I read a few pages of it years ago. Maybe I'll work on that one at some point this year. I wouldn't hold my breath that it will get read though.

New Year - Down to 158

I wrapped up The Fifties this morning. I would say that it wasn't what I expected, but I didn't really have much of an expectation when I picked it up on impulse. (Ironically, it's on sale right now too.) I assumed that there would be some kind of narrative throughout the book, but it's just a bunch of loosely related chapters. There isn't much in the way of analysis or discussion (outside of the choice of which topics and people to write about). We're kind of left to draw our own conclusions, but the leaps required to make these conclusions are minor at best. TV changed the way we make decisions and shaped opinion. Presidential politics, Civil Rights, advertising, entertainment, sports, all of these things were altered by the wiring of the nation. I guess that was the narrative. The nation got smaller in the fifties. A national conscience emerged. Everyone could have an opinion on events taking place well outside of their community. You could experience more of the world from your living room. Well, you could get a sense of the experience. TV provides a produced view of an event. You see what the people running the cameras want you to see. Just like our social media feeds show us what the people we follow want us to see. We build opinions with selected pieces of reality. We feel like we know everything and proclaim our expertise. We really know so little. We're ignorant about so many things. That's a timeless property of living. It's just as true now as it was 60 years ago.

Books like The Fifties perpetuate the idea that we know what's going on all the time. We can read about McDonald's and Russia and Martin Luther King and know how things turned out. We can start with something that emerged as significant and trace it back to some inauspicious beginning. We can tell ourselves that we see wisdom and foresight where there may just have been luck or good fortune. We can cast the heroes and the villains based on shifts in social norms. Events seem inevitable when looked at in hindsight. We read about the things that turned out well. We don't hear about the ventures that failed or aborted social movements. We tell ourselves a story based on a selective culling of the facts. We tell the story that helps the world make sense. We find the neat and tidy explanations buried in the ambiguous and noisy reality of life.

So The Fifties was an adequate book. It was a competent collection of facts told with a compelling style. It's also rather conventional and seeks easy answers to difficult questions. I read it despite feeling like it was a book that I would just pass over again and again. It's in my past. The timing of my finishing this book is nice. It's only January 2 and I already have 1 book completed for 2018, a several hundred page book at that. I'm going for 30 books again this year so that leaves me with 29 to go. For the year anyway. Only 158 to go for Book Shelf Zero (not bad considering that I was looking at 180 at this point last year.)

On to what's next. I find myself once again finishing a book without being well advanced in another book (aside from Ulysses, which I may or may not resume). So many options! I like to have both an ebook and a print book going at the same time so I really have two choices to make. I'm pretty sure my print selection will be the next Flashman book. I'm up to number 8, Flashman and the Dragon. They're fun and pretty quick reads. I've been working through some ponderous stuff recently so something pleasing to read will be a good way to start 2018. As for my next ebook, I'm leaning towards quickly knocking out Getting to Yes With Yourself. This is another one of my impulse Deal of the Day purchases. It sounded like a good book at the time, but I was less than enthralled after reading a few pages. I'm at a point where I can just swallow my feelings on the book and just get through it. It's not very long so it could be a way to build some momentum and make some room for something more involved. I have the Alexandria Quartet as a single ebook. That's four books in one. I could read one, move on to something else, come back, and repeat until finished. I just don't want to start something else overly long after just finishing an 800 plus bag behemoth via the Kindle app.

I'm free to buy books again, but I don't want to get something just for the sake of getting something. I'm sure the urge to acquire some new material will get the better of me soon. I'm just trying to decide if I should get something that I can read quickly or find something with a little more heft.