I guess that depends on what I write

I never really answered the question about whether people would want to read my thoughts on old books. It's probably not something people would seek out, but if the content is worth their time, a few people will stick around to see what else I have to say. It's not a topic with broad appeal, but hyperfocusd, single topic micro publications are the super power of sites like Substack. Would it be interesting? Would it tell people something they wanted to know? I like to read things that help me understand the world. People who have a perspective and share their lens for viewing the world will draw an audience. Their voice has to be authentic. You can't pretend to be something that you are not. Maybe you can be something you always wanted to be but didn't pursue for a whole bunch of reasons but now the tools of the internet allow you to capture a little bit of that lifestyle?

In my fantasy life, I get to spend my days in serious study of some deep and profound topic. I could be writing a novel or some academic paper. The activity or the topic is secondary to the association with study and gaining insight into how some aspect of our reality works. It's about answering questions without easy or obvious answers. Life as a professor has too many unappealing features for me to have ever seriously considered that path, particularly the idea of begging the government for research funds as a physical scientist, but some kind of self-supported thinker writing books or thought pieces would not be the worst way to spend my days. Some of my other little side projects were my attempt to get a taste of that life. I was reviewing Pitchfork's top 100 albums. I flirted with some kind of personal development theme for a more focused blog or book (it was just an exercise to see how hard something like that could be, it was never something I really intended to pursue in earnest). I did submit a request to participate in a workshop with Seth Godin to develop my ideas into some kind of serious project for a big audience. That was back in 2011. What was I even doing back then? My law school blog project was a mini-project to do something and share the outcome with the world. The blogging part of that process was my primary motivation through that entire project. I can look back at that and know that I never really wanted to go. to law school, but that entire process was fun. It was super selfish given how old my kids were at that time and I did think that there were some advantages to pursuing a legal career (if I had had the courage to believe in my system to just go with A for any logic puzzles that had to be worked out in detailed steps, I would have had a 170+ LSAT score and acceptances into schools that would have been hard to turn down). It was also me trying to find a way to be a thinker or at least someone who shared thoughts and experiences with an audience. 

I haven't thought about that Seth Godin Medicine Ball session thing for a long time. I applied just to see what kind of response I would get. It was kind of a low risk way to see if I maybe had the chops to really work on building something online that could be more than just a diversion or fun hobby. That's the kind of thing I wanted to do, the kind of thing I was struggling to find the right words for at the start of this post. I wanted to build an idea into a thing that people could hold and share. A book. A blog that is more than a diary or journal. A produced thing that I had shipped into the world. Something I thought up, generated, and finished so I could share it with others. 

Is my idea to use obscure books published decades ago to explore the world we live in now the next little project for me to try? Seth Godin would say yes. When I was reading him, he was all about shipping. Get an idea, develop it, get it out into the world. I'm taking some of those steps already. I stopped in Book Rescuers just to see if I could find an old book that fit my project. I looked for a few that AI had given me when I asked for obscure old books. I found a few by one of the authors, but not that specific book. I decided to just start looking for books that had that old book appearance. I found one. Under the Eye of the Storm by John Hersey. It was published in 1967. The physical book has some interesting features. The book has 10 reviews on Goodreads. It's not very long, about 250 pages. I plan on reading it right after I finish this book I've been reading about a sex cult. We'll see what I make of it. I plan on having posts for a few books ready to go before I do anything on Substack so it will be an interesting experiment. 

Would people want to read about my thoughts on old books?

If I were to start a Substack, as my effort to build something digital, what would I write about? My blogs, which are essentially online diaries or journals, are primarily about books/reading, career thoughts, efforts to improve my fitness, and occasional musings on my relationship or my role as a man in the family. My first thought is to do something about reading and books. My dissatisfaction with contemporary books is so high I have a personal desire to explore deep into the catalogues and niches of books published decades ago. I'm almost 50 so books published before I was alive could be a fun slant. That might be too limited so maybe that would be a fun category or post/article topic. Reading the books would be a big part of the stack, but the physicality of the books could be something to explore. Older books are smaller, use different paper, more mass market books for more literary titles. The masculine in literature, a virtual black hole of nothingness in contemporary publishing, would be a strong theme. Where to find the books, how to select them (old bestseller lists, browsing used bookstores, award lists (going deep into the Booker Prize)), and maybe old marketing material could be an element of the articles. This would of course give me something to explore when I'm taking too long to read a book. It would kind of be the anti-booktok. Old books being discussed by a middle-aged white man. This topic is appealing because it aligns with things I already do or want to do. I'm not exploring something new only to find it's not appealing to me in the long run. It also takes advantage of our current tech culture, being able to find something almost instantly online, but applying that to something more analog and non-digital. Physical books, the book as a physical object, would be a big part of the content. These things don't have to be hunted down. They could be found. I wouldn't be looking for things people are familiar with either. These would be obscure books people haven't read or thought about for decades. I'm not picking books popular in college course syllabi. It's almost like finding something new in something old. Our cultural legacy is deep. How rich is the writing that was churned out and published for a culture hungrier for books 60, 70, 80 years ago? Do we no longer read because the material we have to read doesn't offer what we find in a good book? Or maybe an old book is a better place to find what we need than a social media scroll. It would be random and exploratory. There will be good books and bad books. That's kind of the point of the entire exercise.

I used ChatGPT to see how it could help identify possible reading targets. I just asked it to help me find obscure books published in 1970. It gave me some good choices. I looked for a few of them in Thriftbooks and the Amazon used market. They were kind of expensive. This makes sense. These are not common books that are all over the place. They're also not particularly popular or in demand either. Using AI kind of extends that whole idea of using the tools of now to plow into the legacy of yesterday. There is a bit of simultaneous worlds or the elasticity of time element to this. Reading books to better understand the way people in a different time engaged with their media and how the content of that media (and the medium itself as a physical object) alters in meaning as the culture and physical world transforms around it. 

I've never been one to challenge the canon, but rejecting accepted ideas of which books from the past are the most worth reading has a subversive flavor. This effort implies rejecting the accepted tastes to find overlooked but still valuable perspectives. A book that didn't resonate or have a big marketing push isn't automatically inferior to the titles that got lucky and gained fame. I wouldn't stop reading the acknowledged master works. My Modern Library top 100 effort fits into this project very neatly. Those books actually offer a useful contrast to more obscure or overlooked books. One is widely read (at least in the context of the modern reading effort) while another is all but forgotten. One of the books ChatGPT suggested has virtually no activity on Goodreads. The reviews are years old. 

The decline of reading is an element of this as well. The rise of the smartphone is certainly a big player in people turning away from books, but is the reading material available to people now contributing to the reading dearth? Most books that get popular on social media are just bad. People like Lonesome Dove, but that book is amazing and was written decades ago. New stuff just isn't good. Seeing what got published decades ago tells us something about what publishers were willing to support 50 or 60 years ago. The feminization of the reading space is also part of the decline. Men read different books than women, but there are virtually no books for men these days. Perhaps I can crack the code for books that men like to read and a new publishing effort can be launched? That's a long term plan and effort. 

Fit by 50?

I'm thinking of stealing an idea from Adam the Woo and working to get fit by 50. He talked about it a bunch last year. Well, I'll be 49 tomorrow so I would have an entire year to get into shape. It wouldn't require much of a change in my plans given the Goofy Challenge waiting for me in January. Now, I could just do enough to get through the races as has been my pattern since moving to Florida, but I very much do not want to just get through these races. I'm fine with just getting through the marathon if I give a good effort in the half. My early thinking would be a solid half effort, which at this point would mean running pretty much the entire distance (with breaks at water stops and character photo ops), and a full marathon time similar to what I've been doing for the last few years. I would like to do better than my previous efforts, at least break 6 hours (which would only require me to maintain some kind of running effort after Animal Kingdom). While actually running is the biggest part of getting ready for this event, cutting some weight, adding more cross training (which means more rowing for me), and more weight lifting to improve my overall strength would all result in better running performance. 

I've already added one small addition to my daily effort as a first step toward these goals. I'm back on the ab exercises. 50 butterfly kicks has been my accepted ab exercise for years. Well, at least it was several years ago. My goal has traditionally been 5 days of this exercise a week. Assuming I take 2 minutes to make this small effort sometime today or tomorrow, this will be the first week I have achieved this goal in years. Once I have this habit re-established, I will work on getting back to the gym 3 days a week. Lifting at lunch has always been the key for getting in my lifting workouts. That's just not going to be something I'm going to be able to bring back as long as I'm at my current job. That means either going before work or in the evening. Evening workouts were a good option when I could go with my son, but he works most evenings. Maybe I should plan my lifting around his schedule. It he's available one evening a week, I could go Friday morning and Sunday. At a minimum I need to start going on Friday morning and Sunday afternoon. I can always do a quick session in the garage to get three sessions if I can make it to the gym for the other two.

As for my weight, no fast food during Lent has reduced my desire for Taco Bell and McDonald's. I didn't even eat Taco Bell this week and my McDonald's trip was largely about convenience more than a desire for that kind of food. I just need to cut down on weekday snaking and desserts to start making some progress. That progress assumes I'm back to running 15-20 miles a week, My foot is much improved. I could probably run at this point, but I'm more worried about aggravating the injury and losing even more running time. It's been one month since my last run, the Springtime Surprise 10 miler. I'm anxious to get back out on the road, but I lost a good month last year when I tried to rush back from my hamstring issue. I would probably be running now if I had just not run prior to the 10 miler. I could have made it just fine without additional training. Oh well, live and learn. 

So there is really no big dramatic plan for fit by 50. It's really just committing to doing the things that I've done in the past (which gets further in the past every year) and have been trying to get back into my life for years. It's doable. It will just take a little effort and focus.

First Quarter Update

I gave myself a little side quest to read a book while my wife was out of town. She left on Saturday. I started Indignation, a Roth book I bought on a used book binge before I left Richmond, that same day. She's still out of town, we'll see her Friday night, but I finished Indignation last night. It's a short book that butts right up to the limit for a novella. My copy is 230 pages, but the font is big and the margins are generous. The shortness of the book made it easier for me to finish in a few days, but the book was engaging and pleasant. It was deeply Roth, but his writing makes up for his focus on intensely personal experience. I'm happy to have read it. Roth is yet another reading project lingering on the edge of my future plans. I should probably finish at least one of my many reading threads before I start crossing titles off of a list. (I've read 3 Roth novels according to my Goodreads records with another one of his books in that I'm not sure if I actually finished this on space.)

Indignation is the fifth book I've finished this year. I'm ahead of last year's pace, I was just finishing up my fourth book this time last year, but way behind my reading pace of years past. At least I haven't bought any books this year. I actually haven't even felt tempted. I want to read down the pile that I've built up over the last year or so. All my recent buys are intriguing so I'm not looking for something new to pique my reading interest. We'll see how easily I refrain from book shopping once I'm left with the ambitious reads that I scooped up in my carefree and optimistic youth. That's in the future. I'm content with what I have in front of me at the moment. I started Submission today. Houellebecq feels like a superior Roth. I appreciate the masculinity inherent in their novels. I'm the antithesis of the reader publishers care about right now so there isn't much contemporary stuff that really resonates with my life experience. I can read and appreciate current prominent women writers, but it's nice to have a book that resonates with my male brain (no matter how estrogen soaked). That lack of really compelling new material is a big reason why it's been easy for me to stick to my book buying ban. I expect that I will just drift into older books rather than wander into the pointless crap on the tables at Barnes and Noble (older books outside of the most classic of classics have essentially disappeared from B&N shelves).

The book I finished before Indignation, The Doctor's Wife, was an effort to go back to men writing free from the imposed guilt of being a white man. It was a fine book, but there was a strong feminine energy (which I guess shouldn't have been a big shock given the title). The use of a female protagonist had the same feeling of the main character in the Hulu Predator movie Prey. The character didn't need to be female. The story could have been told with a similar impact and result with a male character. The use of a woman (girl in Prey? Her age is ambiguous) feels like an attempt to be subversive rather than being an essential element of the story. I guess there are no more men's stories. We're all just interchangeable people. Strong women must be more essential than strong men. 

I'm making no progress to become a strong man. I've decided that my reluctance to go to the gym is rooted in my dislike for the Y that I've been using. It's an excuse, but it's also true. I've never really liked the way the free weight area is set up. A new Crunch is opening soon. I'm hoping new scenery (and equipment) will get me back into a gym groove. One evening, Friday morning, and Sunday afternoon would be enough to get back on track. Easy to say, harder to execute. I'm starting to get fat so I need to start lifting again soon. My body is aging quickly. I may not have many years of throwing 225+ around on the bench. 

First reading update of 2025

Two months into the year, I've managed to finish two books. That low number is more due to the massive Wind and Truth that I read to start the year more than any lack of reading on my part. I obviously didn't read as much as I could have during January and most of February, but I managed to make it through the fifth volume of the Stormlight Archive. I've decided that the disappointment people have expressed about Wind and Truth is more about the exceedingly high expectations created by the first two books in the series. W and T was overly long and lacked the exciting action that was central to earlier volumes, but it moves events along nicely. The increasing importance of the Cosmere in Sanderson's books is also likely turning people off. I've read enough of his other stuff that I knew Wind and Truth had to end with Odium positioned to influence the wider Cosmere. That's the only way that story can really move forward. We may have even seen some of his plans being executed in other Cosmere books. If you're not into that broader narrative, Wind and Truth is not going to do much for you. I will keep reading the series despite the massive time commitment required to get through them. 

I've also finished James. I had read about half of that before I bought Wind and Truth so it was an easy task to finish that slim (by comparison) book. Everett is a good writer so the book was a pleasure to read. I'm not as taken with as all the acclaim would suggest. That acclaim is too based in the broader scope of the book more than the book itself. That's just a decision that culture has made. Celebrate the political or social space staked out by the book rather than the inherent quality of the book itself. I don't regret reading it. 

I picked up The Last Picture Show after James. I have about a third of the book left. This was a quick read. I've read a good bit of McMurtry so it's been nice getting back into the appealing flow of his prose. The dialogue is believable, the characters are authentic, and the story is well paced. The efficiency of this book highlights the bloat of Wind and Truth. The danger of The Last Picture Show will be going on to read the sequels. I could probably get them from the library (print versions, I don't see them in Libby), but I would rather focus my reading effort on my owned books. Maybe there is a place for an audiobook. I've never listened to a McMurtry book. I should finish this one by the end of the weekend to get to 3 books for the year. At least I will stay on my book a month pace. 

I pulled The Doctor's Wife off the shelf with The Last Picture Show. I read a couple dozen pages soon after it was delivered. I was quickly engaged with the story, but I was in the middle of James and about to start Wind and Truth so I set it aside. It's a short book so it has the appeal of a quick read to go with a good story. I may change my mind, but I'm pretty sure that will be my attempted book 4. I will need a quick read as the college basketball tournaments are about to ramp up. Those will take my focus for a good chunk of March. I'm actually building some reading momentum. I should really try to get at least a few pages in around the games.

I have stayed strong with my book buying ban. I haven't really even been tempted. 

Making my life better

If I need a reason for why I do things like run the WDW Marathon, getting the year started overcoming a big challenge could be as good a reason as any. I completed my fourth WDW Marathon in 4 years on Sunday.. My times are incredibly consistent given the nature of the marathon. I finished 3 of those 4 marathons in 6:20. The only exception is 2023 when I sat down wrong and messed up my knee a couple weeks before the race. I'm not going to revisit my recurring marathon training themes. I know what I need to do to be more comfortable in these runs. If I'm not up for the training, why do I keep entering this race (other than I really enjoy the whole runDisney vibe)? A pretty basic answer is that the race provides motivation for me to actually get out and run. My recap of my first WDW Marathon in 2022 highlighted that I was using the race to get my training runs back up to at least 10 miles. I run more when I am registered for a marathon. My run volume would plunge without a marathon looming over me. The race itself is highly rewarding. Every hard event is inherently rewarding, but covering all those miles on Disney property gives the marathon a little extra panache. There are drawbacks too, but the positives far outweigh the negatives. I also do the marathon because I can do the marathon. I'm approaching 50. My time for these kinds of activities is not unlimited. I need to accept the challenge while I still have a choice. There will be a day when my body makes the decision for me, but I still have the agency to make the choice to get out there and cover the miles. Running the marathon just feels like a better choice than not running the marathon. It's a choice that makes my life better. 

Making my life better is the point of all my resolutions/side quests/various pursuits and activities. Reading makes my life better. I'm not going to detour into detailing the specifics of how reading makes my life better, but it does. My Bookshelf Zero challenge is about getting me to read the books that I expect will make my life better. Reading a challenging book is not always pleasant in the moment, but I will be better for having read it (just like I'm better for having endured the marathon). Staying strong and losing weight are about staying healthy and active so I can live my life as I choose. I watch my Mom lead a small life where she has implicitly accepted all kinds of limitations by not taking care of her health. That is not the life I want to live. I set resolutions to give me an extra kick to get to the gym. It doesn't always work as much as I would like, but that goal probably gets me there more than if I didn't have that external measure. 

I put a book buying ban on myself this year. That restriction makes a moment less fun (lots of good choices for sale at the library yesterday, but no books for me this year), but focusing on reading what I already own makes my life better. I attempted to explore jazz last year. I was looking to expand my musical horizons and find new rewarding experiences. I found that I don't particularly like that style of music, but at least I gave it a try and don't feel like I'm missing out on something that would make my life better. I failed a goal, but I learned something valuable about how I experience the world and derive meaning from what I experience everyday. 

Of course I only explore a small part of my life in this space. I rarely delve into professional goals and challenges. I never share any details about the nature of my relationship with my wife or how I feel about being a parent. I call my resolutions and other goals side quests because my family and career are the primary adventure. Doing all that I can to make those parts of my life the best they can be will do more to make my life better than any book I read or workout I complete. I've made the decision to find another job. My current job is not doing much to make my life better (or maybe the best thing I could do to make my life better would be to find a new job). I've applied to what looks like a good opportunity. We'll see how it all plays out. I've been thinking deeply about my relationship with my wife. I look back at some of my actions with regret (it's about how I have failed to show her how I feel about her with words and actions, not any deep betrayals like cheating or something like that), but I'm focusing on how to move forward and make what we have better. Small improvements in my marriage will make my life dramatically better.

Here's to making my life better in 2025.