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I think my reading habits are too spontaneous and I should probably go back to making up "curriculums" for myself. I did this two years ago with the Napoleonic Wars, where I read a mix of nonfiction and fiction about that time period. I read David A. Bell's The First Total War and some sections of Napoleon: A Life and supplemented it with fiction like War and Peace and The Death of Napoleon. I really enjoyed this--I think it helped me get immersed in what I was reading and provided the structure that allowed me to connect everything. I think my main issue right now is that I've got some crazy ADHD when it comes to reading. I like to read multiple things at once, I'm completely inconsistent with how much I read, and every book on my roster is ridiculously disjointed from the rest. To illustrate my point:
In April I read 17776, Oedipus Rex & Antigone (skipped Oedipus at Colonus but I should really read that too), got about two chapters further into The Name of the Rose, read a few chapters of Eichmann in Jerusalem (a book that I've had since last year), chewed through half of Forbidden Colours in a day and a half and then didn't touch it for two weeks for some reason, then couldn't decide whether I wanted to try reading Lolita or Gravity and Grace out of the PDFs I have in my Calibre library.
Essentially, last month I was primarily dividing my attention between sentient space probes spectating evolved football, postwar Japanese homosexual trysts, and incestuous Greek tragedy (side note, it's real funny to me that Sophocles wrote Oedipus Rex about the king of a city-state less than a two-hour drive from Athens. That's like if I wrote about the mayor of Seattle doing his mom and then gouging his eyes out). I'm driving myself crazy. I need to just sit my ass down, pick up a book and read it front to back.
More than anything I feel I'm really doing a disservice to myself when I'm neglecting so many topics I'm interested in but know little about. I'd love to get deeper into western philosophy but I think to glean the most knowledge from any philosophical work you've got to have background knowledge about the pervasive (typically religious) ideas and political conflicts of the time. I feel linear reading is more important in philosophy than it is in literature or even history (as strange as that may sound). It's like math in a way, you could try differentiating without knowing what a quadratic equation is but you'll likely arrive at the wrong conclusion and confuse yourself in the process. I read The Prince knowing jack shit about renaissance Florence and the Medicis and though I was able to "work backwards" (ie. draw parallels between Machiavelli's ideas and modern political thought and sorta see the influence) many of his contemporary references flew over my head. You get my point, I gotta quit getting distracted every time I see a shiny new title. Gotta hunker down and study.
In April I read 17776, Oedipus Rex & Antigone (skipped Oedipus at Colonus but I should really read that too), got about two chapters further into The Name of the Rose, read a few chapters of Eichmann in Jerusalem (a book that I've had since last year), chewed through half of Forbidden Colours in a day and a half and then didn't touch it for two weeks for some reason, then couldn't decide whether I wanted to try reading Lolita or Gravity and Grace out of the PDFs I have in my Calibre library.
Essentially, last month I was primarily dividing my attention between sentient space probes spectating evolved football, postwar Japanese homosexual trysts, and incestuous Greek tragedy (side note, it's real funny to me that Sophocles wrote Oedipus Rex about the king of a city-state less than a two-hour drive from Athens. That's like if I wrote about the mayor of Seattle doing his mom and then gouging his eyes out). I'm driving myself crazy. I need to just sit my ass down, pick up a book and read it front to back.
More than anything I feel I'm really doing a disservice to myself when I'm neglecting so many topics I'm interested in but know little about. I'd love to get deeper into western philosophy but I think to glean the most knowledge from any philosophical work you've got to have background knowledge about the pervasive (typically religious) ideas and political conflicts of the time. I feel linear reading is more important in philosophy than it is in literature or even history (as strange as that may sound). It's like math in a way, you could try differentiating without knowing what a quadratic equation is but you'll likely arrive at the wrong conclusion and confuse yourself in the process. I read The Prince knowing jack shit about renaissance Florence and the Medicis and though I was able to "work backwards" (ie. draw parallels between Machiavelli's ideas and modern political thought and sorta see the influence) many of his contemporary references flew over my head. You get my point, I gotta quit getting distracted every time I see a shiny new title. Gotta hunker down and study.
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This post reminds me of:
Older Chests https://share.google/FxEPZrxnBCPQlZns0
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also: i have never heard of Calibre! it looks cool (maybe a bit old... the homepage has a picture of my model of 2007 MacBook Pro on it and if you click it it has a BEEEEAAAAAUUUUTIFUL overview video recorded on KDE 4 <3)! i keep an Anna's Archive list of EPUBs for books i want to read, but i usually just buy physical copies. i like it better that way. i feel like books always need a sense of physicality. i have some EPUB thing on my 3DS. but anyway, i have a big backlog and i want to start doing what you're trying to stop doing. what a coincidence!
P.S.: what did you think of 17776? have you read 20020? the first time i read the duology i got filtered out by all the football talk but i reread it later and i was able to stick through it. i like it but you can really tell its written by a football guy. i mean, it's a football-based thing, but i kind of see that as an unfortunate part of it being written by Jon Bois, Dr. Football, M.D., but he has a creative enough mind that i can look past it. or, well, i can look at it. i can digest the football stuff. sports is not my forte. the sci-fi makes up for it though.
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Calibre is pretty great, I like having a nice compact file manager to access the stuff I've been meaning to read, except I don't actually have that many PDFs and EPUBs in it yet. I think I prefer physical books as well, or at least some sort of separate reading device with e-ink that I can take on walks with me and use before bed. I might opt for a new e-reader (maybe a Kobo or something) to replace the Kindle I lost a year and a half ago. Man, I had so many EPUBs on that thing. I miss it. I also think part of the reason I've been reading less is that all my books are on the same machine as Fallout New Vegas, Civ 5 and Warband and I don't have the self control to not boot up Steam whenever I've got a couple hours to myself.
I haven't read 20020 yet, but I plan to in the future. I'm not a football guy either but I found 17776 poignant nonetheless. I think the part that got me hooked was the apartment thing in Chapter 4. Location and memory are entirely intertwined in my mind but somehow I never thought about how many times you could find yourself back at the same place and not even realize it if you had forever to live. You'd probably have to keep a collection of photographs or some kind of extensive record even to prove (to yourself) your own existence at a given point in time. The Denali cannon was great, I felt actual dread when the Centennial Light was struck. My favourite game is Juice's favourite, partially because the pitch reminds me of the monstrosities I used to make on TinkerCAD in middle school design class. Also because I really like the way it's explained. It's so beautiful in its disorder.