Reading

I’m not sure that anyone, myself included, really needs this post. On the other hand, I read a thing about re-reading and I want to write about *that* but keep getting hung up on reading. So I wanted to write a little bit about how I think differently about reading than I used to.

This is a story about I went from feeling like I should read more to feeling happy with — and about — reading. I use the word should too much and I’m trying to “stop shoulding all over myself”, as a therapist once said. I spent a long time feeling like “I should read more” and now I read a lot and really enjoy it.

I’ve written about reading on the blog before. I had two different projects to read books, Project 3 to read 25 books in 52 weeks and Project 15 to read 12 books in 21 weeks. I’ve also posted quite a few different notes on the things I read or lists of the things I read and from 2017 to 2022 I posted one word reviews of books. Reading more or better has been a regular resolution in my year end posts.

Like I said, I’m not sure I needed to write this. I like reading, so I read a lot. This is probably all we need, but I will say that beyond liking to read I’ve also given myself permission to read what I like and to ignore what I don’t like. That lets me enjoy the bits of books that I think are really good and if a book has bits I don’t like, I kind of don’t care.

Sometimes that means I jump to the end of the chapter if a confrontation in a book bugs me, or I might hit the skip ahead  button. Sometimes that means speed reading, or setting the speed on an audiobook up to 2x (or 3x) if I decide I don’t want to spend that long with a book — or if the book is written by Asimov, but I guess I repeat myself.

I’ve also given myself permission to stop reading books. Some books aren’t the right book for you to read right now and in the past I tended to slog through, refusing to start the next book until I finished this thing I didn’t want to read. The result was I used to … not read as much. Accepting that I can read for the love of reading alone has been immensely freeing and now when I hit a book that’s not the right book for right now I can move on.

So now I find I can enjoy the parts of books that are good. I can enjoy the writing or the characterization or the setting, even if I don’t love the other parts. I often everything now-a-days, but I have permission to step out whenever I want.

So person on Mastodon who replied to my year end post on reading, “Wow, you read a lot of books.” You didn’t ask, but that’s how I read so much. I enjoy it, I skip the bad parts and I listen to Isaac Asimov at about 3x speed.

If you were to ask me — and I’m aware that you haven’t — I would say if you want to read more, do it because you think it’s fun. Read the books you want to read, don’t worry about what’s good, skip the parts you don’t like, you can always come back later. Put down books you don’t like or that you’re not interested in. Maybe find a couple friends who read a lot as well (thanks friends on Goodreads) and figure out which of the books they like that you’ll like.

Anyway, I think reading more, and more happily, has been a big step forward in my overall mental health and I’m glad to be doing it.

Books are good. (Wow I really could have written a shorter post.)

Project 3: 25 books in 52 weeks : Wrap up

The 25 books in 52 weeks project ended on September 3, 2012. I'm writing this wrap up a week later.

I started this project with the intention of kicking myself back into reading. For a bunch of reasons I'd stopped reading almost totally and really felt like I was missing it, but it was hard to start again. The original goal was basically to read a book every two weeks, which is not too ambitious a goal. I still found it to be harder than I'd have liked but managed at the end of the day to get through 12 books in 52 weeks (which I guess leaves me at 48% completion rate).

I re-discovered through this project how much I enjoy listening to audio books and actually listened to most of the books I finished rather than reading them off paper (or e-ink).

I feel much better about reading now, although I still need to balance my approach (since I tend to read a book all at once over a day or two, rather than a little bit at a time for a longer while. I also want to reduce the gaps between books (which I tend to cause by becoming obsessed with some other media thing) and be generally more even in my media consumption.

The Books I Read

• The Atrocity Archives - Charles Stross
• I love John Le Carré's George Smiley books especially the focus on the infrastructure built by the espionage organizations. The Laundry books do an amazing job of invoking that feeling and mixing it with some Lovecraftian world mangling and a healthy dose of Dilbert.
• The Jennifer Morgue - Charles Stross
• As with the George Smiley element in The Atrocity Archives, the James Bond elements in the Jennifer Morgue work very well as well. 
• The Fuller Memorandum - Charles Stross
• Unlike the other two Laundry books, I felt like the Fuller Memorandum was more "in it's own style" although that may be because I haven't read the books wikipedia mentions as influence. All of the Laundry books are a lot of fun to read and I'm very excited that the next major novel is coming out in the next few days.
• Mort - Terry Pratchett
• I'm working my way through the Terry Pratchett books in publication order and I have to say that I found Mort much harder going than the first three (Colour of Magic, The Light Fantastic and Equal Rights). With the first three it was fairly easy to slip into the world as odd as it was, but Mort feels like such a festival of anachronism that the world is hard to accept. 
• The Alloy of Law - Brandon Sanderson
• I loved all of the first Mistborn trilogy, but especially the first volume. I enjoyed the action and adventure and heistyness and especially how alive and active Vin felt. The other two were good as well but I found that they didn't move as quickly as the first (which I think is something of a standard problem for Brandon Sanderson). The Alloy of Law felt like a return to that first books energy and I finished reading it and wanted to pick up the next one immediately. (Which is sad because I think the wait might be a while).
• The Sword of Shannara - Terry Brooks
• I read this book at least partly due to having never finished the project I undertook in junior high school where I promised that I would read it. I found this, especially for the first two thirds to be an incredible drag with uninteresting characters. As I eventually began to accept it as a Tolkien based D&D campaign rather than "people run back and forth in a small park" (seriously the longest march they undertakes is about 4 days, how close are all the major cities). The end had enough charm and momentum and I don't regret reading it, but I'm glad to have relieved myself from that particular guilt of my youth and don't think I'll pick up any of the other books from the series without some serious motivation.
• I should also point out that I seriously expected Menion Leah to have no idea what a woman was when he first meets Shirl. The entire first three quarters of the novel is devoid of the mention of women, so it seems to me that Menion should have been totally baffled. Serious missed opportunity for an Ethan of Athos kind of world. 
• Great by Choice - Jim Collins and Morten T. Hansen
• I liked the ideas put forth in Built to Last and Good to Great. I think that Great by Choice is better than either in that the findings of the book are much more applicable to the daily life of a graduate student. It's certainly worth a read and is an especially good jumping of point for trying to be more productive.
• Cryoburn - Lois McMaster Bujold
• Any adventure with Miles is fun. The more mature version of Miles we get today has a different feeling than his earlier, more energetic self, but a good Xanatos Gambit is always great.
• Sourcery - Terry Pratchett
• Of the Wizard books, I think this one had too many wizards in it. It also feels like it treads the path of the coward Rincewind a little too heavily. We already did that in the earlier books.
• Leviathan Wakes - James S. A. Corey
• Leviathan wakes, the first book of The Expanse is a good, fairly hard, sci-fi story. I haven't ready sci-fi like this for a while and generally I thought it was okay. It dragged a bit and was grittier than I really enjoy in the middle but I found the ending really engaging. I also found the swapping between characters a little frustrating, which is maybe inevitable with Corey actually being two authors. I also felt like the chapters were coming in the wrong order (that Miller's chapters and Holden's chapters should have been flipped).
• The Apocalypse Codex - Charles Stross
• As with the Fuller Memorandum, this book felt very much it's own genre (as opposed to the earlier Laundry books). It had a lot of features that reminded me of the earlier books in general, but was a really great read. It left me wanting Stross to write more of these and faster.
• Caliban's War - James S. A. Corey
• This is the direct sequel to Leviathan Wakes. Overall I found I enjoyed it more than the first, but was strongly put off by the child abduction in the opening scene of the book. I also felt that it didn't really drive the story as far forward as it might have, didn't provide more in depth examination of the situation or the characters and left off at almost the same point as the first book. As with the first the ending was definitely the strength and left me wanting to get onto the third book. 

Project 3 : 25 books in 52 weeks : Update 1

So as with everything associated with this blog, I'm behind on my reading for the 25 books in 52 weeks project. I started the project on September 3, 2012 and will wrap it up on September 3, 2012. As it's June 29, 2012 at the time of writing, 43 weeks have elapsed and I've only made it through 7 books. Ideally at this point I should have read about 23 books, but the point of this project is to push myself back into reading so I'll take having made any progress at all as a good thing and will see where I've made it to by the time September 3 rolls around.

New Books this Update 

• The Atrocity Archives - Charles Stross
• I love John Le Carré's George Smiley books especially the focus on the infrastructure built by the espionage organizations. The Laundry books do an amazing job of invoking that feeling and mixing it with some Lovecraftian world mangling and a healthy dose of Dilbert.
• The Jennifer Morgue - Charles Stross
• As with the George Smiley element in The Atrocity Archives, the James Bond elements in the Jennifer Morgue work very well as well. 
• The Fuller Memorandum - Charles Stross
• Unlike the other two Laundry books, I felt like the Fuller Memorandum was more "in it's own style" although that may be because I haven't read the books wikipedia mentions as influence. All of the Laundry books are a lot of fun to read and I'm very excited that the next major novel is coming out in the next few days.
• Mort - Terry Pratchett
• I'm working my way through the Terry Pratchett books in publication order and I have to say that I found Mort much harder going than the first three (Colour of Magic, The Light Fantastic and Equal Rights). With the first three it was fairly easy to slip into the world as odd as it was, but Mort feels like such a festival of anachronism that the world is hard to accept. 
• The Alloy of Law - Brandon Sanderson
• I loved all of the first Mistborn trilogy, but especially the first volume. I enjoyed the action and adventure and heistyness and especially how alive and active Vin felt. The other two were good as well but I found that they didn't move as quickly as the first (which I think is something of a standard problem for Brandon Sanderson). The Alloy of Law felt like a return to that first books energy and I finished reading it and wanted to pick up the next one immediately. (Which is sad because I think the wait might be a while).
• The Sword of Shannara - Terry Brooks
• I read this book at least partly due to having never finished the project I undertook in junior high school where I promised that I would read it. I found this, especially for the first two thirds to be an incredible drag with uninteresting characters. As I eventually began to accept it as a Tolkien based D&D campaign rather than "people run back and forth in a small park" (seriously the longest march they undertakes is about 4 days, how close are all the major cities). The end had enough charm and momentum and I don't regret reading it, but I'm glad to have relieved myself from that particular guilt of my youth and don't think I'll pick up any of the other books from the series without some serious motivation.
• I should also point out that I seriously expected Menion Leah to have no idea what a woman was when he first meets Shirl. The entire first three quarters of the novel is devoid of the mention of women, so it seems to me that Menion should have been totally baffled. Serious missed opportunity for an Ethan of Athos kind of world. 
• Great by Choice - Jim Collins and Morten T. Hansen
• I liked the ideas put forth in Built to Last and Good to Great. I think that Great by Choice is better than either in that the findings of the book are much more applicable to the daily life of a graduate student. It's certainly worth a read and is an especially good jumping of point for trying to be more productive.

Status

• Project Completeness: 7/25 - 28%
• Time Remaining 9 weeks.

Project 3 : 25 books in 52 weeks

As I think I've mentioned one of the reason why I'm doing this blog is to try to stop the powerful force of my own procrastination. One of the things I've procrastinated the most about is reading, and while I mean the reading I need to do for my PhD to some extent, the reading I've really been missing out on is reading for pleasure.

So I'm starting a project to try to increase the amount of reading I get done. Over the next 52 weeks, I'd like to read 25 books. Hopefully it will take less that 52 weeks as this isn't a very ambitious goal, but I want to give myself a chance.

I've started by taking a look at the huge pile of books I have sitting around that I haven't read yet, and a few that I've been thinking of reading again. I've listed these books out below. I don't guarantee that these will actually be the 25 books I read, but at the moment they're what I'm planning to read.

Title	Author	Notes
A Short History of Nearly Everything	Bill Bryson
Agent of Change	Sharon Lee & Steve Miller
The Atrocity Archives	Charles Stross
Camelot 30K	Robert L. Forward	Re-Read
The Collected Short Fiction of C.J. Cherryh	C.J. Cherryh
The Complaints	Ian Rankin
Cryoburn	Lois McMaster Bujold
The Dragon Book
Essex County	Jeff Lemire	Canada Reads
The Fionavar Tapestry	Guy Gavriel Kay	2nd Try
Fluke	Christopher Moore
Fortress in the Eye of Time	C.J. Cherryh
Fool	Christopher Moore
Good to Great	Jim Collins	Re-read
Local Custom	Sharon Lee & Steve Miller
Matter	Iain M. Banks	Hopefully no extracted eye balls or unnecessary surgery
New Sprint	Robert Jordan
Nebula Awards Showcase 2009
Regenesis	C. J. Cherryh
Spirit Gate	Kate Elliott
The Sword of Shannara	Terry Brooks
This Alien Shore	C. S. Friedman	Re-Read
Unless	Carol Shields	Canada Reads
Will Grayson, Will Grayson	John Green & David Levithan
The Years of Rice and Salt	Kim Stanley Robinson