The Gondwanaland of my soul
Dec. 14th, 2006 03:54 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
pjthompsonLast year I started keeping a list of all the books I read, and the ones I picked up and put back down. Because? I like making lists. It's one of those tasks I give the neurotic, anal left half of my brain to keep it out of the way of the creative, spontaneous right side.
I wanted to see if I could read 52 novels by the end of the year, but alas, it doesn't look like I'll make that goal. I'm somewhere in the lower 40s, but I don't know the precise number. The list disappeared from my harddrive (I suspect I disappeared it thinking I had a backup copy) and Norton was not able to recover it. I recreated most of the list—did I mention I was anal?—by going through the various recycling bags which hang around my space for an inordinate amount of time, and by riffling my memory. But there are four or five books I couldn't recall and must have already recycled.
Also adding to my lack of reading achievement this year was a phase of restlessness in the fall that lasted about a month and a half. I kept picking books up and putting them down at very stages of completion—some of them quite late in the game, and some of them that I was enjoying very much until my sudden loss of steam. I didn't finish one novel during that entire period, and I'm still trying to catch up with my partial list. I've always done that, finished some books in stages, but not usually for such an extended period of time, and not usually so many at a time.
It's been a strange, restless autumn and early winter, and the book thing is merely a symptom of something else. I'm marking time on some mysterious subterranean level; the tectonic plates of my psyche are shifting and rearranging themselves. My internal Gondwanaland is breaking up, and Lord only knows what continents will form up when that process is done.
It's probably a good thing, but the time of shifting plates does tend to make for a sense of uncertain footing.
Random quote of the day:
"The most important thing for poets to do is to write as little as possible."
—T. S. Eliot
It's interesting that two poetry quotes would come out one after the other. They went in at different times and came from two different sources. Sometimes the randomness of the random quote file seems almost zen in its selectivity.
I wanted to see if I could read 52 novels by the end of the year, but alas, it doesn't look like I'll make that goal. I'm somewhere in the lower 40s, but I don't know the precise number. The list disappeared from my harddrive (I suspect I disappeared it thinking I had a backup copy) and Norton was not able to recover it. I recreated most of the list—did I mention I was anal?—by going through the various recycling bags which hang around my space for an inordinate amount of time, and by riffling my memory. But there are four or five books I couldn't recall and must have already recycled.
Also adding to my lack of reading achievement this year was a phase of restlessness in the fall that lasted about a month and a half. I kept picking books up and putting them down at very stages of completion—some of them quite late in the game, and some of them that I was enjoying very much until my sudden loss of steam. I didn't finish one novel during that entire period, and I'm still trying to catch up with my partial list. I've always done that, finished some books in stages, but not usually for such an extended period of time, and not usually so many at a time.
It's been a strange, restless autumn and early winter, and the book thing is merely a symptom of something else. I'm marking time on some mysterious subterranean level; the tectonic plates of my psyche are shifting and rearranging themselves. My internal Gondwanaland is breaking up, and Lord only knows what continents will form up when that process is done.
It's probably a good thing, but the time of shifting plates does tend to make for a sense of uncertain footing.
Random quote of the day:
"The most important thing for poets to do is to write as little as possible."
—T. S. Eliot
It's interesting that two poetry quotes would come out one after the other. They went in at different times and came from two different sources. Sometimes the randomness of the random quote file seems almost zen in its selectivity.
no subject
Date: 2006-12-15 07:52 pm (UTC)Most of it was not based on memory. I keep bags of books for a friend of mine who I loan reading material to. I finish a book and toss it into the bag and give her a bag only every couple of months or so which means I've usually got 3 or 4 bags of books in the pipeline. I went through those and the "too awful to save" bag that goes to library book sales and recreated what I'd read. Only a few books relied on my memory.
The trouble also is, I re-read a heck of a lot. I was actually cringeing when you said you recycled books.
I don't reread so much but that doesn't mean I constantly get rid of books I've read. If I've really loved something, I hang onto it. Which is why I joke about living in a book-lined cave. The books I recycle are the ones that either I didn't like at all or ones that I may have liked okay, but they weren't in that *love it must hold onto it* category. Those generally go to friends or to libraries or senior citizen centers or the like.
I do know that I didn't read anything but Sf and F barring a couple of mysteries.
Same here. And I do read romances now and again, though the bulk is sff and mysteries.
I've tried reading out of the genres but unless your name is Dorothy Dunnett
I'll have to try her one of these days.
Perhaps I should do this next year, just to see what I do actually read.
It's actually kind of fun. In my original file I did mini-reviews of each book, but that's completely lost now. :-(