Bookshelf Zero: My owned but unread list currently stands at 169 books. I finally finished A Bend in the RIver. That's the third book I've read by VS Naipaul. I understand why he is (was?) held in high regard, but his books are not fun to read. It's nice to have read them, but the actual process of reading them is just not very much fun. Rewarding and insightful but kind of boring and tedious. I also read one of my Booker Shortlist from 2021, A Passage North. That book is brilliant. I could write an essay but I won't. I'm currently working on the second volume of Malone's Jefferson bio. I'm not zipping through it because I keep falling asleep rather than reading later in the evening. I may be able to pick up something easier and get through it more quickly in the moments that I am not dozing off, but I'm committed to getting through it. These are books I want to read. There is an ongoing effort to erase important historical periods and people. You don't have to like Thomas Jefferson, but he was a key figure in the formation of the United States. Feel free to criticize Dumas Malone's regard for his subject, but that doesn't mean what he says is false. It's like hearing about someone from a friend. The perspective is colored by feelings, but dispassionate and purely rational regard is inhuman. Rejecting all knowledge that violates the tenets of orthodoxy leftist idolatry narrows our world and shortens our perspective. That's by design. I vehemently reject that design so I engage in the subversive act of reading books about slave holding white guys written by admiring white guys.
35 books read in 2023: Not gonna happen. I'm at 20 for the year. This is an improvement over last year's 18 books. Maybe I will figure out how I was reading 30 to 40 books a few years ago and recapture that frenetic pace, but I'm just not getting through books at that clip right now. I just looked over some of my lists from previous years. There were plenty of quick and easy reads in there, but there are a decent number of serious books sprinkled through the lists. My life just isn't built like it was in 2015 or 2016. I need to recognize this simple fact and move on. I've had so much angst over how my life doesn't fit into that mold anymore. It was great, but I'm not in that place anymore. For all that I was doing things that I felt like I should be doing, I wasn't doing anything to grow or expand my experience. I found a very safe and secure spot where I could do pleasant things and not really deal with anything very consequential. So I read lots of books but otherwise just kind of drifted along. I'm not drifting now. I would still like to read more books.
Read a Dickens work: Nope. I'm just not feeling highly wrought Victorian novels right now.
Completing various reading lists: I've crossed a few books off of each of my 3 lists this year. A Bend in the River is a Modern LIbrary Top 100 book. That's my second of the year. The first was The Postman Always Rings Twice, which is such a short book it kind of feels like cheating to include that effort in the list. I may read another before the year is out. I've read a couple New Canon titles. Checked off a Drizzt book. I'm working through these things. They don't get any longer and I haven't added any new ones so there is progress being made. I have read enough good books that I would never have thought to pick up if not for these lists that I will continue to pursue completion. They keep me away from so much of that crap that is getting published it's worth going deeper down these rabbit holes to keep escaping from the horrors of the modern publishing enterprise.
There are others, but those are the ones that I try to keep in the tightest focus. We'll see how the year progresses. At least I've avoided the ponderous time sucks that plagued my reading time last year.
