With the Culture close to completion, what comes next?

I'm looking at all of Drizzt books as the next longish series that I tackle in my NPR Sci Fi/Fantasy 100 efforts. I'm closing in on finishing the Culture series so I will have some time to give to another of the many series on that list. I'm reading Surface Detail after I finish Hotel du Lac (hopefully tonight but definitely this weekend, depending on how much Tetris 99 I play before making myself go to bed early enough that I can get up to run tomorrow (Saturday March 9)). That will leave Matter as the last novel. I'm a bit torn on the short story collection. Do I need to read the entire collection to consider my efforts with The Culture complete? I will rule on this topic for myself after I finish Surface Detail. 

The Culture is a 9 novel / 1 short story collection series. There are 26 Drizzt books. They are conveniently broken up into several trilogies so that provides some natural breaks. I have three of them as audiobook already (all acquired during some kind of sale). I will likely start with the first of these after I finish up with The Corrections. The audiobooks are a little over 10 hours, which is like a 300 page or so book. The library appears to have most of them available as ebooks so I can try the series out without any real commitment from a dollars perspective. 

It's the audiobook aspect of these books that has moved them up the list. I thought Xanth would be the next series to pursue, but I wasn't exactly blown away by the first book. It was mildly amusing, but I wasn't super eager to move onto book two. I will definitely get back to that one, but I'm going to explore some other space first. 

I will save this as a draft now, hopefully I will get back to it tomorrow having finished Hotel du Lac (and be down to 146 books to Book Shelf Zero). 

Before going though, I would like to highlight that I've made it to March without buying a single book. I've checked out loads of ebooks from the library (way more than I have actually read), but my shelves are free of books purchased in 2019. That streak will end with Matter, but it's been a nice stretch!

Late Feb update posted in early March

A short reading update before I launch into a state of my life type of post.

The reading. I finished Tobacco Road, a novel that goes deep into the life of the poverty stricken, and French Exit, a novel that explores the pointlessness of life through the experiences of an uber-wealthy matriarch who has lost it all. Let's just sum up both books by saying that we all have our struggles. That's actually not a bad summation of literature in general. We all struggle and suffer. The means of that struggle defines our individual experience. Literature captures that wealth of that human struggle. Good books are a little glimmer of hope amid all that pain and anguish.

Both Tobacco Road and French Exit were library ebooks. I had to wait months for my turn to read French Exit. I've read de Witt's other novels and enjoyed them so I was willing to wait my turn to enjoy his latest work. I settled on Hotel du Lac for my owned book. It's short and what I've read has been highly satisfying. I just haven't been reading it all that much. The rediscovery of the crossword puzzle and the ever present allure of Tetris 99 have been eating into my reading time. Those distractions are a shame as I have been surprisingly engaged by this slim novel. I bought it years ago in one of my trying contemporary literature spasms. I thought it would drag and be a rewarding but challenging read. It's not the slightest challenging. The language is clean and the images evoked in just a few phrases are richly detailed.

It's ironic that I'm reading a book I bought in an effort to explore more contemporary work as I have been binging on contemporary stuff all year. That binge continues with Winter's Bone. It's back to the poverty stricken with this one, but these struggling people have a much sharper edge that the Tobacco Road clan. There is none of the passivity and obsolescence that defined the Jeter (or whatever the name was) family. Fight and struggle is very present in Winter's Bone (or at least the 10% or so of it that I have read so far). The book itself isn't much of a struggle. Short chapters are a nice incentive to keep reading. It's not hard to just read the next chapter when it's only a few minutes of reading.

So I wrote more than I planned about the reading. I touched on the state of my life stuff briefly with my passing mentions of Tetris 99 and the crossword. These technological driven distractions are not good for my reading goals. My new phone has enabled me to start doing the crossword again. My old phone was too small to interact with the puzzle. Seeing the entire puzzle and the keyboard is no issue with my iPhone XR. Some nights I zip through the puzzle in 15 minutes or so, while other nights can take an hour. My interest may fade with time, but right now I'm digging the crossword thing again (I used to do it every morning when I was in grad school).

Tetris 99 is an unholy combination of Tetris and online game play. It's an entirely new way to experience a game that I've been playing since I was 14 or so. I'm still working out the best strategy, but I've managed to win 4 times and I manage the top 10 most of the time. This game is way more fun than pretty much anything else I do once the family is in bed so I am strongly tempted to play frequently. I'm trying to extract some kind of larger experience lesson from all of my playing. The strategy I use when I play the old Tetris on the NES is not the optimal strategy for this battle royale version. Relearning how to play a game that I pretty much just play on autopilot is undoubtedly a challenge. It's always good to challenge yourself to find new ways to do things that you've been doing for years.

That's good for now. I planned on delving into fitness and health and aging but the post got away from me a bit. Next time I guess.

Countdown to Book Shelf Zero: 147