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

Back to 147, and another fun milestone in my reading quests

I've always written the bulk of my posts while at work. All I needed was an afternoon free of meetings and other obligations to make a few comments on my progress to Book Shelf Zero. My job has changed a bit and those free times have all but disappeared. Updates on my reading progress have all but disappeared too. That doesn't mean that I'm not making progress of course. I managed to finish my second owned book of the year, Look to Windward (another book from Iain M. Banks Culture series) earlier this week. Another excellent entry in an excellent series. That brings me back down to 147 books owned, equaling the lowest to be read number that I have managed to achieve in my quest. It was the seventh book that I've read this year.

Look to Windward has the distinction of being the 100th book of the NPR Sci Fi/Fantasy list that I have completed. Only 215 to go!

Ebooks from the library continue to dominate my reading time. I've been reading Tobacco Road for the last few days. It's a Modern Library Top 100 book. The books in that list seem to fall into two categories. Highly readable short novels that get read with no real effort, and difficult for a variety of reason books that take a focused and concentrated effort to complete. Tobacco Road is of the first group (Deliverance immediately comes to mind as another member of that group). It's a very short book. I'm more than a third of the way through it with nothing more than a few random reading moments given to it. It has a distinct rhythm and it treats the poverty stricken family at the core of the book with near indifference. It has none of the schmaltzy glorification that was so obnoxious in The Grapes of Wrath (which is very much one of the takes forever books). The time and conditions depicted are so far removed from my experience that I can't say if the book captures a moment of the American South or it stands as a commentary on the bias of a writer looking down on the unfortunate from a position of privilege. I look forward to getting through the rest of this quick read (hopefully this weekend).

The question of which of my owned books to read next stands waiting for me to bring some kind of resolution. I was planning on reading A Bend in the River, but with Tobacco Road going, I'm not sure I want to get started on another ML Top 100 book. I'll look over my shelves tonight to see what strikes my fancy.

One final note. I'm feeling good about below 147 before I buy another book. I have another Culture book on my shelf so I can continue to pursue this excellent series without making a purchase. I also just don't feel like buying anything. The library satisfies the acquisition urge and making progress towards the big Zero feels good. Hell, I still have the gift card I bought at B&N over Christmas to get the free $10 in my wallet! 140, here I come!

Writers abound and Dickens bores

I'm flirting with trying to read 52 books again this year. Zipping through Early Work and Immigrant, Montana, library books that I borrowed after seeing the titles on the NYT Notable 100 list, has me sitting at two books for the year. A brief thought about contemporary literature. Is every protagonist a writer? All of the books that I've recently read that were written in the last couple of years have writers as the main characters. This recurring theme is getting tiresome. I'm a week away from finishing Martin Chuzzlewit, and I should make it through my next library ebook, A Spell for Chameleon, before heading to Disney World next week. That would bring me to 4 books read 4 weeks into the year. We'll see if I can maintain this pace for another month or so before I commit to the big 52 number again (or 53 just to set a new high score).

I must finish Martin Chuzzlewit before I head to Disney World. The fat book I was reading the last time I was in Disney World, Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell, has somehow woven it's way into my vacation experience (I also have unreasonably vivid memories of the book I read on our first trip back in 2015, it was In the Red Circle or something like that. It was a SEAL memoir.). Memories of the resort are interwoven with associations from the book. It's a weird memory alloy. I really don't want to associate Martin Chuzzlewit with Disney. (I'm not exactly thrilled with the overlap of JS &MN with the magic of Disney either.) This is easily the most boring Dickens book I have read. I'm well past the point when the story really gets going. Sure Bleak House and Our Mutual Friend started slow, but once all the threads starting coming together the book was a pleasure to read. I can vividly remember reading several of the late chapters of Bleak House on one of the lab computers in graduate school. I couldn't get enough! Not so with Chuzzlewit. The characters are all so moralizing and flat. The cracks made at the United States are trite (maybe they were edgier or more interesting 175 years ago), and the frequent coincidences characteristic of a Dickens novel are predictable and boring. At this point I'm pretty much reading to finish the book. I kind of want t know what happens, but I'm not all that eager to get there.

I am eager to finish the book and head to the magic of Disney. I'm eager for a three day weekend, but I'm dreading the cold.

Isn't this supposed to be fun?

That didn't last long. It was nice to be at 147 for a few days, but I'm already back up to 149 after buying two Culture books, Look to Windward Surface Detail, over the last week or so. This leaves me with a net gain of 10 books for 2018. That's not great, but it's also not horrible. I'm not likely to finish Martin Chuzzlewit (or any other book I own) before the end of the year so that's where I will end up for 2018, at least when it comes to making progress towards Book Shelf Zero.

I will finish at least one more book before the end of the year. I'm close to finishing Skyward, a new book by Brandon Sanderson. It's a library ebook that I'm reading on my Kindle. I did a quick finish of Asymmetry, another library book, to load it onto the Kindle a day before my loan expired. I almost bailed on it, but I read just enough in the give it one more try session that I got sucked into the story. It's not anything fantastic, but it's fun and I want to find out what happens. He acknowledges that this was just a fun side project for him around the massive Stormlight Archives titles so I wasn't expecting anything mind-blowing going in. I convinced my son to get the first book in one of his other YA series so this may be a space that I explore more fully in the coming year.

Asymmetry is the only book that I've finished since wrapping up Hydrogen Sonata. Another book from the 21st Century Canon, another library book. It was a decent enough book, but it just tried too hard. It was full of the serious literary intent that makes too many contemporary books flaccid and unappealing. The first and third sections were very good, but the middle section, a novella later revealed to be written by a character in the first section, was cliche and boring. I'm sure this won't be the last time I feel this way about a book from that list. It was short and I didn't buy it so it's not like it was a huge lose (and a good chunk of the book was worth reading).

I'm getting a bit fatigued by this whole Book Shelf Zero endeavor. It's been a fun challenge, but I'm feeling like I am betraying my reading by making it a means to an end rather than the act of reading being the point of reading a book. My reading has been about crossing a title off of some list rather than being about the pleasure of an entertaining story or the appreciation of a beautiful passage. I set up these little tasks around so many aspects of my life. My Epic Quest spreadsheet that started as a bit of a lark to get me to do ab exercises and get to the gym to lift weights is an uncomfortably central aspect of my life.

I track all of my reading in the Epic Quest spreadsheet. I note my completed books in Goodreads too, but the spreadsheet is where all meaningful activities are recorded. It's where I tracked my marathon training and how many miles I've run, meters I've rowed, how many days I've been to the gym, did ab work, and recorded 10,000 steps. I'm about to finish my third year of recording all of this stuff. All of these activities earn me points. This has been my best points year by far. This approach is effective, but it's not very rewarding. I'm in a race against myself. It gets old after a couple years.

Book Shelf Zero has been effective in it's primary task of making me closely consider every book purchase. I've been close to buying the rest of the Culture series just to have them on hand. There were some good options in today's Daily Deals (the Grant bio and the new Murikami book were very tempting), but I couldn't give up on the idea of Book Shelf Zero. The few dollars that I would save by buying the books on sale weren't worth pushing my to be read number back up above 150. I have a vague recollection of stating that I would be comfortable with about 10 books of progress a year. I would hate to undermine that progress, even if it is making reading feel like a secondary task, than just throw up my hands and splurge on a few books.

If the library had all of the Culture books available as ebooks my progress would have been several books better. Of the 10 books I bought this year, 6 of them are Culture books. The discovery of the ease of getting ebooks from the library was a huge drag on Book Shelf Zero (but a boon to making it through those lists of worthy books on which to spend my valuable reading time). Of the 43 books I have read this year, 23 of them were library books. Of the 20 owned books that I read this year, 6 of them were books that I bought this year. So I read 14 books this year that I owned at the beginning of the year, and most of those I read in the first half of the year.

So I'm chiding myself for reading a series that I really enjoy because I have had to purchase many of the books and lamenting easy, free access to a huge library of books because I have been able to read all kinds of interesting and entertaining books on my phone or Kindle rather than laboring through the books I already own. This is exactly why I'm feeling fatigued by this whole Book Shelf Zero thing. I've had a great reading year, but I have spent much more time reading new stuff rather than plodding through more of Martin Chuzzlewit (an enjoyable read but not as fun as Skyward or something else I picked up from the library). Lighten up and live a little for crying out loud. Stop taking yourself and your silly little challenges so damn seriously!

Finally 147!!!!

After months of having my to be read number bouncing back and forth between 148 and 149, I have finally pushed it down to 147. The Hydrogen Sonata, the Culture book I let my wife talk me into buying when it was a Kindle Daily Deal, got the honor of being the book that gave me my first bit of progress towards Book Shelf Zero in several months. I always go into those Iain Banks books thinking they will be quick reads only to have them go on for weeks and weeks. I thought I would make it through Excession on vacation (I had a week) and failed (despite all the extra reading time I picked up at the beach thanks to crappy weather). The latest Culture book was also something I thought would go quickly only to have it take weeks to read.

The Hydrogen Sonata is the tenth Culture book. This one fits the formula pretty well. A central conflict is set up, the Minds gather to discuss, a human is pulled in, and the event unfold to a neat conclusion. It was a fun read despite repeating a formula very similar to Excession (which is actually referenced, kind of unusual in a series where each book's story is largely independent of what happened in the other books). I'm eager to move on to another Culture book, but I have to finish another of my owned books before I will buy one of the four Culture novels I still need to read. I want to push my to be read number lower still before I make another book purchase.

That next book will be Martin Chuzzlewit. I set this latest attempt to read another Dickens book aside while I read The H Sonata. I have read 20 pages or so in the few days since finishing the Culture novel. It's a bit of a drag at this point, but I'm still really early in the novel (yes, even a quarter of a way through the book I'm still in the early stages by Dickens standards). I know that it will pick up and read quickly once all the scenarios are in place. I just hope I can get there before the year ends. I still have a long way to go in the novel. I expect to have a pretty slow week at work. I have the ebook version of the novel in my work phone. I may use time just sitting at my desk to read a bit. A hundred or so pages read at work would make a big difference in finishing this one by the end of the year. (Thinking about reading a Dickens book at work reminds me of reading the climax of Bleak House on a computer while I was in grad school.)

Asymmetry will be a drag on finishing my Dickens book for this year. This is a much more engaging novel. It's also short and easy to read. The dialogue is so natural and the story moves despite much in the way of detail. The politics are predictably annoying, but the writing is worth overlooking the predictable liberal worldview of the central characters. This is a book I will definitely finish before the end of the year. I'm currently at 42 books read in 2018. I would like to hit 45. We'll see if that happens.