A long overdue update

I have once again matched my lowest number of to be read books. I'm back at 147 after finishing The Map and the Territory last week. The last bit of that book took an unexpected turn, but I think I get what Houellebecq was getting at with a creative/destructive impulse thing going on. It was a weird ending, but nothing like the weirdness that suffused The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle. I've read plenty of Murakami, but TWBC really takes the crown for random, weird stuff going on in a novel. I enjoyed reading the book. It's a good thing that I did as I spent several weeks working my way through all of its 600 pages. I finished that one a week or two before I read The Map and the Territory.

I had some library reading between those owned books. I read The Topeka School. I waited awhile to get this one so there was no way I was going to let it slip past the borrowing period without finishing it. I was actually reading this and The Map and the Territory simultaneously for a few days. They were getting way too mixed up in my brain so I set aside the owned book for a bit. I'm only a few years older than Ben Lerner. The sections about high school felt very real and familiar. I didn't live in Kansas, but white kids living in suburbia had a fairly consistent experience in the late 90s. The sections about proving your manliness were a bit less familiar. I relied on my size and status as a starter on the football team to vouch for my masculinity. I never really felt the need to prove anything, unless being able to bench press 315 pounds is considered demonstrating my masculinity. Maybe it was, but I was also a virgin with no girlfriend so I wasn't really checking all the stud boxes either.

I had fun reading Buzz Saw, a book about the Washington National's World Series winning season. I bought the book for the family so I never counted it as a book that I bought. My daughter read it so I wasn't just justifying a way to get a book without adding it to my tally (and violating my plan to avoid buying books in 2020). I expected it to be a quick read. I was not wrong. It was very fun to revisit the season (particularly given that there is no baseball, or any other sport, being played at the moment). I finished that book a couple of days ago. It was the 8th book I've finished this year. 

I wasn't sure what to read next. I picked up a Jefferson bio that I have on my nightstand last night. It focuses on his relationship with Monticello. The book was surprisingly engaging. I had to force myself to put it down to attend to some things I needed to take care of for work. I'm not sure that I will stick with it though. I'm listening to the big Alexander Hamilton bio on Audible (after abandoning Neal Stephenson's latest), and I'm not sure I want to have two Founding Father narratives running parallel in my brain. I'm not sure what else I would read though so I may have to deal with having two sides of a big story going on at once. 

Looking forward to hitting 146. I don't have much else going on in my life at the moment so it's nice to have a goal!

My narrative on my reading choices

The question of should underlines pretty much every aspect of my Book Shelf Zero quest. I should read all the books that I have bought. My decision to buy certain books was guided by an idea of what I should be reading. The notion that I should be reading (rather than playing video games, watching some show or movie, or doing something else with my time) more was one of the numerous subtle motivations that got me started on this decision to read all of my books. I thought it would be fun to watch the progress and reflect on what I was dealing with as I read through my books, but it really just felt like something I should do. It felt right. It felt consistent with what I'm trying to accomplish with my reading.

I should be a certain kind of person and that kind of person reads a certain kind of book. Or simply reads period. I freely acknowledge that this approach to reading, an activity that brings me considerable joy and happiness despite my insistence on projecting identity reinforcement all over it, is  pointless. The question that emerges for me from this perspective on my reading habit and the constructs that I have erected around it is how I reached this state in the first place. What psychological hole did reading fill? Reading helped me make sense of the world at some point. That mindset persists well into my adulthood. Why is it still here? Is it making me a better person or allowing me to stay a pretentious ass?

I've asked myself these questions before. I ask them over and over again. As I keep asking them, whatever answers I dug up must not have been very satisfactory. Getting good answers must mean taking a new approach. I stumbled on this new approach a week or so ago. I found this interview with Nick Chater. Chater has written a whole book about how our minds are improvisation machines, constructing our reality in real time. The idea is similar to how emotions are constructs the brain applies to particular physiological states, with the context for particular arousal states playing a key role in determining the emotional interpretation. So my motivations to read are not based in some need buried somewhere in my unconscious experience. There is not unconscious experience in which to base that need. It's just something I do because it's something I've always done.

There is no need for me to tell myself some intricate and involved story about why I read. I don't need to plunge into my dark corners to find a motivation to read or understand why I'm not all that into reading at any given time (like now). Those stories aren't getting at anything directly related to my reading habit. I haven't been particularly motivated to read much over the last month or so. I've been reading, but my progress on any given book is fairly slow. This is likely more about my life circumstances over that period of time than anything directly related to my reading choices. I've been wrapped up in the baseball playoffs and playing Dr Mario on my phone. I've been cutting myself a bit of slack on feeling compelled to make progress on some arbitrary goal. I've been working on giving more energy to my family. My lack of posts on this blog isn't evidence of my inability to commit to the blog. It's a combination of having no time to write posts at work and the lack of a good computer for blogging at home.

I've spent too much of my life thinking that what I did had a direct impact on my value as a person. Reading more books makes me a better person. This narrative is not very helpful. It motivated me to read more books, but it wasn't much of a help in being a better husband or father. Reading all of my books won't make me a better person. It will just make me somebody who managed to read the books that he bought. It's not a statement of value.

Now, reading on the plane while everybody else is looking at their phone or some other screen is definitely evidence of my superiority over my fellow airline passengers.

   

That summer reading list...didn't happen

I had good intentions when I made a list of books to read before heading to Disney World. The trip is complete, but the same thing cannot be said about any of the reading plans that I laid out in my last post. I have finished five books since I read the last page of Surface Detail. Three of them were ebooks borrowed from the library, one was an ebook that I bought after starting the book while I had it out from the library (it was long, The Priory of the Orange Tree), and the fifth one was a physical book that I borrowed from the library. No books that I own were read, no Roth, nothing from the top shelf of the bookcase in my garage. I haven't even made much progress on the Civil War book. Oh well.

None of those things are part of my current reading activities either. I just read a handful of pages from The Last Samurai during a break at work. Well, this is an ebook that I own so I guess it's in one of my stated reading goals. I bought the book when it was a daily deal a couple of months ago. This is the top book of the 21st Century Canon that I've been sampling over much of this year. I knew I was going to read it eventually so I figured I might as well pick it up for cheap. It's an excellent book. I'm withholding judgement on it's place on that list until I finish the novel. That should actually happen pretty soon.

I've been reading Amusing Ourselves to Death while I'm hanging out with my kids in the morning. It's a handy physical book to pick up when I don't want to set the being on your phone all the time is acceptable example. It's short, engaging, and very relevant to our current pop culture obsessions. I will probably not remember much of it in a couple of months (that happens all too often with these easy to read nonfiction books), but it's something that I'm glad to have read. The Civil War book, The Destructive War, has not been officially abandoned but I haven't picked it up in weeks. The vacation is one reason I haven't read much of it, but the time I spent reading The Priory of the Orange Tree is also a big contributor to my lack of progress. That was a long book. It was easy to read 4 or 5% of it a night, but that consumed pretty much all of my reading time. We'll see if I switch back to that as my handy physical book after I finish Amusing Ourselves to Death.

I started reading The Crystal Shard on the train down to Disney World. I zipped through 100 pages or so in a pretty short period of time. I thought I might finish it during the vacation, but I did absolutely no reading while on Disney property and lost a huge reading window when our train was cancelled due to Hurricane Dorian. This is a book I will quickly finish after I complete The Last Samurai.

Damn, I knew I had a few reading balls in the air, but this is crazy! No wonder I feel scattered (at least when it comes to my reading life)!

Down to my last Culture novel

After sprinting through the last bit of Surface Detail (things always get good when a bunch of related but separate story lines come together), I am down to my final Culture novel, Matter. There's still the short story collection after Matter, but I am more about the novels than short stories. I thought about picking up Matter right away (it was just sitting on my nightstand), but I decided to save that book for a bit. I've enjoyed this series. There is no reason to rush to the last book (this is no Harry Potter or other series where each book is part of a larger narrative, the Culture books are just stories that take place in the same world, each book is complete in and of itself). I picked up a different book that has been on my nightstand for many months, a book about the Civil War called The Destructive War. I only planned to read a few pages to pass the time, but I ended up getting drawn into the book. I've read the first chapter. We'll see if it's something I want to stick with.

I didn't put books about the Civil War on my books to read before going back to Disney World at the end of August list. Summer reading lists are not something I've done in the past, but I'm trying to trick myself into being more about the books on my shelf than the books I can borrow electronically. I've read 19 books this year but only 4 of them are physical books that I own. The list is short, only 4 items (coincidentally), but there is no lock that I will address each of the points over the next 70 or so days.

Item 1, I want to finish the Culture novels (which really means read Matter). This will be the first series from the NPR list that I will have read in its entirety after starting my pursuit of completing the list. It's been a fun trip, but Matter is not exactly a thin book. It took me well over a month to read Surface Detail. I have managed to extricate myself from my Tetris 99 mania, but I still sacrifice plenty of reading time to play that game. I could use up a big chunk of my summer on this one fat book if I don't make an effort to get through it relatively quickly.

Item 2, read one of the ebooks that I own. I don't even remember what I have sitting in my virtual shelf it's been so long since I scrolled deep enough into my Kindle library to take a look at my options. Most of them are pretty long books (which is why I haven't read them yet). I will have to let my library books streak end a bit to make this one happen, but that is kind of the point of the exercise. In flipping through my options, there are a few that hit me as potentially interesting. This could be worth pursuing in earnest sooner rather than later (particularly as I only have one booked checked out from the library at the moment).

Item 3, another book from the top shelf of the book case in my garage. I filled this shelf with especially interesting books a few years ago. They were all unread at that point. I've read about half of the shelf, at least as defined by the amount of space taken up by the books. I see these books all the time when I'm on the treadmill or using the rowing machine. Might be time to take a few down and read the back to see if any of them pique my interest.

Item 4, Roth. There is one book in particular that I had in my mind when I wrote that one down. It's been off the shelf and on the floor under a chair in the room where we play video games for a couple of months. I'm always intimidated to read Roth until I start reading him and realize how pleasurable it is to read his writing. This particular book is hardcover, which I never really enjoy reading, but it's probably a fairly quick read.

We'll see how success I am in getting myself oriented back towards Book Shelf Zero with this list. I'm back to 146 books remaining. I'm almost a quarter of the way finished from the inception of this insane little project.

General Malaise

I did pick up Surface Details after finishing Hotel du Lac, but there was a bit of a gap imposed by a book my boss gave me to read. Mindset had some interesting ideas. It's too bad they weren't all that interesting to read about. That book was boring and repetitious. I've read a bunch of library ebooks on my phone over the last couple of months, but I have made zero progress on Book Shelf Zero. The purchase of Matter actually put me back one book.

This failure to make progress on this long stated and surprisingly long term goal has me fairly unmoved. Moving beyond reading to check a book of a list is a nice development. Feeling pretty blah about the entire enterprise is a  little less heartening. I've been working on making the pursuit of arbitrary goals a less significant part of my life, but I failed to work on figuring out what I put in place of that pursuit. Life's been feeling a bit on the drab side recently. Well, parts of my life anyway. The parts of my life where the ambition to distinguish myself in either real or more delusional ways are what have really suffered. I create pursuits like Book Shelf Zero to give me a channel to spice up my life around folding the laundry, taking kids to school, and sitting through endless meetings about the details of various projects. My job used to be a place of meaning and ambition. It's not really doing much of that anymore.

It would be very fair to say that the last year of my work life has been challenging. Challenging projects and the evidence of bad leadership are part of that challenge, but the absence of discovery, exploration, and getting to the core of a new problem are what have really been dragging me down. I thought it was dealing with a new role, a new boss, and constant organizational uncertainty (all of which are certainly part of the issue), but the variable with the really big coefficient is the absence of a side project where I get to explore and discover. When I look back at periods of my work life when I felt very engaged and rewarded, I was working through a problem with an answer that wasn't obvious. I'm locked in constant process issues right now. That's suffocating. At least it's personally suffocating. This is the path for career success.

I'm not so interested in career success at the moment. I want to do my job well, but I'm not sure higher levels of responsibility are for me. My job is never going to be my top priority. My family and personal pursuits are always going to be more important to me. Research problems are closely aligned with my personal pursuits. That's how I've extracted more than minimal efforts into my job. Do good enough on the stuff that has to get done while doing my thing on something I find interesting that's also meaningful to the company. The independence of those activities was a huge part of their attraction. I could pursue my intuitions and questions without having to convince others that this was the prudent choice.

I can do the organizational stuff. I just don't find it particularly interesting. The signs of boredom have been popping up all around me. I sit in my living room playing Tetris 99 rather than going to work. It's not the game that's keeping me here. I'm avoiding going to work. If it wasn't Tetris 99 it would be reading or doing something like this. It's my small rebellion. I'm tired all the time, working out from habit and pretty much going through the motions, and spend more time thinking about going to Disney World than the projects I'm responsible for at work.

So I'm at a bit of a professional inflection point. There will be no speedy resolution to this one. That organizational turmoil is not going to be resolved anytime in the next several months. So I can keep moping around being depressed about my lack of autonomous (but still business relevant
) research or I can seek out ways to get more of what I need from my current role. I need to do the role I'm in now. It's a transitional state into something new and different. I would be happy to go back to my old kind of role in a more senior role, but I really don't want to report to the guy I reported to before. I had more autonomy as a bench scientist than I do as a Sr. Manager (that's a cruel truth to corporate life, the more organizational power you hold, the less free you are to pursue things that are interesting to you). Finding my own thing will be challenging, but I have one or two ideas of what might work for me.

I really just need to stop letting my dissatisfaction with my job from investing other parts of my life.

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