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The Gondwanaland of my soul
Dec. 14th, 2006 03:54 pmLast 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.
