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

I was shaken twice while reading this book. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Where do I stand?

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Redbreast - 161 remain

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

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

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

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

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

Courage (Ulysses) - my brush with the heroic

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Remaining books, 164

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

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

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

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

Vacation Reading

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

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

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