a reading drought
If my wiki’s ReadingQueue page is to be trusted – although it seems broken rght now – I have’t read any books in months. What’s going on? If I count comic books, I’ve read two. That’s hardly a big improvement over nothing, I think.
Fortunately, my birthday is quickly approaching, and I’ve already got a few things lined up. Today, Gloria gave me “Call to Conversion,” which I’ve wanted to read for some time now. Yesterday, I went to the Moravian Book Store to use my birthday discount. Jayne seemed surprised that I only got one book, but I was honest: I have too much crap piled up, right now, to add a lot more to the pile. I just felt like it would be a shame to let the discount go to waste.
I picked up Welcome to the Monkey House. I read all, or at least most, of it years ago, but I really wanted to re-read it, and it seemed like a good book to have on hand. I’m about a hundred pages into it, and it’s better than I remembered. Vonnegut is definitely among my favorite writers; he’s sincerely sour an sincerely sweet, often at the same time. I wonder whether he is tired of being compared to Mark Twain.
I also recently picked up Perl Debugged, which I’ve wanted for a while, now. I have a small pile of other technical books I want to read, too, sitting in my office. I think that what I really need to do, to get through that pile, is to take the advice from my favorite fortune cookie: simplify your life with recurring patterns. I need to figure out when I want to read, and then follow through with that plan.