Reading Projects

Bookshelf Zero is not my only reading project. This is not news to the careful reader of the blog. I have my two Big Lists of books to read. The Modern Library 100 and the NPR list of science fiction and fantasy books. I added the 20th Century Canon list to my reading spreadsheet as well. I've mentioned those active pursuits, but I have a few other little projects going on at the same time. I've been saying I'm going to read Proust for years. I've read the first book and that took my 3 tries to get through. I own them so they are part of Bookshelf Zero. We'll see if that has an impact on my progress. I'm also working my way through a shelf of books in my garage (I think I've mentioned this one too). I had read zero of the books when I shelved them, I've read about half of them at this point. I intentionally picked books that I really wanted to read for that shelf so it's no surprise that I've made reasonable progress on this mini-project.

The reading project that gives my wife the most joy is my decision to read all of Dickens. I read some Dickens book one year and decided that I would set a New Year's Resolution to read all of his novels. I failed that resolution. I kept making it, eventually simplifying it to just reading one book in a year. I've read a decent number of his novels (I actually don't have a list of this one ongoing, that should change), but I haven't read them all...yet.

There are a series of books about the Civil War in Virginia. I've read the first two (maybe three) years (each book focuses on a single year of the conflict). They are short books composed of a a half dozen or so essays by academic historians. They are almost too easy to read. I should go back and read another one. They are engaging, informative, and not overly intimidating.

I've been working through the Flashman books for years. I'm pretty sure I've mentioned this after finishing a couple of the books last year or the year before. The humor and creativity of the series was great in the first several volumes, but the series has gotten a bit formulaic and stale as I get near the end. Flashman's story bounces around chronologically so it's not like the series is building towards some big climax. I have two titles left. They are short, fun books. I just forget about them (and I have to buy the last two books as they are hard to find in libraries). I should finish just to say that I've finished the series. James Bond is in that same class. Short, fun, but getting a bit old as the series drags on (or, said another way, as the author gets older) but I should get finish it and move on.

I have finished some reading projects. I've been successful reading big series. The Wheel of Time, Malazan, Culture, and Harry Potter are all completed reading projects. I've read all four Lonesome Dove books too so it's not like I only read series in a particular genre. Although I do read plenty of fantasy series, like the Cold Fire trilogy. I somehow made it through John Dos Passos U.S.A. Trilogy. I was too politically naive when I read those almost 20 years ago. I would say that I should reread them but they were boring and I have better books to read. I read Rachel Cusk's Outline trilogy. That was an easy one. The books were short and excellent. Asimov's Foundations series is good, but the Red Mars trilogy got bogged down in the politics of the nearly immortal first settlers. Looking back on it is more pleasurable than the experience of reading the books. I'm pretty sure I've read all the Mitch Rapp books that Vince Flynn wrote (I haven't read any of the books written after he died).

More projects are always being considered as well. I recently bought the first volume of Malone's Jefferson biography. I feel like that's the one to read to really be up on my Jefferson knowledge. (Yes, I said bought, so much for no books in 2020, and it wasn't the only one.) That would be a new reading project (it's also a book acquisition project, that's certainly a key player in my pursuit of some of these series). I have jotted down a few books from a list of recommended Civil War books that I saw a year or so ago. I bought one of the books, still haven't read it though. I recently looked for a PhD reading list for the US colonial period, particularly Virginia and Williamsburg. Boston College has huge reading lists to help history PhDs get ready for their exams. Wow. These lists are long. I have a few of the books that I saw on these lists and they are not exactly short. Reading one of those would be a huge undertaking (but would provide lots of opportunity to acquire all kinds of fun new reading material!).

So I will just leave a brief note here that I have managed to finish Jefferson and Monticello. An excellent book, a very good recommendation by the tour guide. I have also bought 5 books. This Covid bullshit was just too much for me. I needed some kind of outlet. I found Thriftbooks.com and it was just too easy to acquire a bunch of fun books. I will list them once the two other books I just ordered arrive. It will be 7 in total. I'm back up to 152 once all is said and done. I will say more on this number next time.

Mid May isn't so bad

So much for not buying any books this year. Thanks thriftbooks.com. I checked out the site after seeing a picture that somebody posted of a photograph stuck in a book that was just delivered. I had read a column about some book that dealt with European revolutions. Was that book available on this thriftbooks site? Yep, it was under $5. In the shopping cart. What about that big Jefferson bio, the 6 volume one? Volume 1 is on the site, also for under $5. I sat on those a few days, added a history of jazz by this guy I heard on the Conversations with Tyler podcast who has a good Twitter a few days later, and finally gave in and made the purchase. I blame the coronavirus. I have so little going on in my life right now. I just wanted something to look forward to (and I always look forward to new books being delivered).

A big part of the book being delivered fun is tracking their progress from wherever they originate to my door. All three of these shipped from different places so that makes it three times the fun! I was looking at the European revolution book and noticed that I bought book 2 rather than volume 1. Whoops. No problem. Volume 1 is on the site and also under $5. I get free shipping if I spend more than $10. I found a book from this list of contemporary books over 500 pages worth reading and added to more books to my haul. So much for my new low. I'm not really bothered by it at all. 

That list of long books worth reading also provided my introduction to my most recent finished book. Life After Life. I got it from the library. It took me a few chapters to get into the flow, but once I picked up on the structure, the book really started to resonate with me. The whole killing Hitler thing is a bit cliche, but it's kind of done and discarded so it's not really the center of the book. Urusula leads a few very painful lives. It's not all roses (well, she also dies frequently so there's that). It was a worthy read. The list held up for my first book selected (I have read a few already on the list, including the recently finished Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, so I knew that the taste level was pretty high. It's not a list I will be pursuing in completion though. I already have enough reading projects ongoing. 

I guess we can add the Malone bio to the list of reading projects, although that may be a bit premature as I only acquired the first book a few hours ago. It's fun to embark on a new reading project. I guess the ones worth doing get finished and the bad ideas get dropped. I haven't read one of the Modern Library books in over a year. Thanks to Drizzt, I'm still chipping away at the NPR list. The 21st Century Canon and that long books worth reading list have a few overlaps (like Middlesex, a book that constantly pops up as something worth reading that I just haven't gotten around to yet, I bet it's on thriftbooks.com). I expect that I will keep whittling those lists down over time. At least they can't get any bigger. 

A brief update before I go on the audiobook realm of my book life. I have stuck with Alexander Hamilton. It's a surprisingly engaging book given that it's a biography. The fact that he emerges as Jefferson's rival (and that he just leads an interesting life that has been told well in Chernow's hands) makes the book an interesting counter to my other readings. I hit a bit of a dreary section in the post-War years, but I have been listening to the Hamilton soundtrack on my runs and that has shown me what lies ahead if I can push through Hamilton's early career as a lawyer. The book and musical are nicely reinforcing so the songs provide a fun way to review what I've heard while giving me a sense of what's to come. Maybe I'll finish it before all this COVID BS resolves itself (I will be surprised if I I finish it in a world that looks similar to what we were in a few months ago).

Book Shelf Zero: 147

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.