Eric’s Blue Reverie

…the grand triumphant return of my Reverie.

On to important matters.

Many times in life we require an event to mark the beginning (or ending) of an endeavor, behavior, habit, state of being.  There are the obvious, (new year’s resolutions, graduation, a wedding) those of necessity, (stopping smoking now that the new tax would require a second job) and the completely random (see below).

I’d always wanted to have a complete list of everything I’d read.  ”Hey, did you ever read…?”  I’d always be able to answer that.  But, I was too OCD to actually do it.  I couldn’t have a list because I couldn’t be sure I wasn’t forgetting something or misremembering — Did I read the Invisible Man by Wells or Ellison? — and so I never did it.  I was young enough then that I wasn’t quite up to either but for the record it’s Wells, though Ellison is on my list.

Then one day I picked up Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged which weighs in at over 1000 pages and contains a 60 page philosophical rant masquerading as a character’s speech.  So when I finished I felt so accomplished that I wrote it down.  When I finished my next book I wrote it down next in the list.  I had my event, finally I could have my list.  I kept it up too, when it got to cumbersome in a text file I transfered it to a spreadsheet and I could really start to get some interesting stats.

All of this is a long way of introducing that I’ve had another event.  I’ve been meaning to restart my personal site for years.  I never got around to it for one reason or another, waiting to find the right service to host it or to get around to building one from scratch (and I wonder why it took so long…)  Then I found it, a lovely, pretty service that offered just enough customization and just enough click and go to get me going.  I tested it out by finally getting a wedding site up for Meggy and I.  Check it out @ MeHeartYou.us — there’s basically no content there yet but I assure you there will be some soon, an angry bride will make sure .

Unfortunately some limitations with the service and multiple accounts — complicated by my budget — put off using it for my personal site.  It would have been yet another excuse to put it off except it wasn’t my event, today was.  When I’d been tracking my reading for about a year I figured back to when I’d read Atlas Shrugged and marked everything finished through April as year one and everything finished from the next May on as year two.  Today marks the beginning of my seventh reading year, my best to date.  Which, in my book obsessed mind, makes a lovely first post.  So I found a new service to at least get the blog up and running and now I can get my post out on the appropriate date.  The rest — hopefully — will come.

So, how did this past year in reading go?  Pretty well in comparison but not nearly well enough.  I’m got up to 86 books and I finally cleared 300 on the list — 303 is the current total — but I only made 22 print books down from a consistent 25 from the last few years.  While I’m continuing to find more hours in the day to drive audiobooks to almost three times that and ebooks continue to make small progress my print book waiting list — which spills out of a dedicated bookcase — continues to taunt me.  I need to pick it up this year.  The same goes with the 1001 list, really dropped the ball there.

Highlights:

• Discovering Sherlock Holmes — He’s not a Twain defined classic.
• Randy Pausch — ‘nough said
• The Robber Bride by Margaret Atwood — Sloooow and was unsure until the end but I loved it all in retrospect.  Must come up for a reread someday.
• Memories of My Melancholy Whores — Must read more GGM
• Calculating God — SciFi Theology mmmmm…
• Cory Doctorow — Particularly Little Brother and a rereading of Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom
• Fight Club — The book has a better ending
• A Clockwork Orange — Masterpiece
• The Gospel of the FSM — May you be touched by his noodley appendage
• Lady Chatterley’s Lover — Beautiful
• Saga of the Seven Suns — Epic
• Kafka on the Shore — This one slipped in at the buzzer, one of the best 1001 books I’ve come across yet.
• Reading Sigler in print — Dude, the jersey?, dude.
• Non-fiction finding new life via audio — I get bogged down reading it in print.
• Watchmen — Amazing
• Seven Views of Olduvai Gorge — a fitting epilogue to the original birthright

Disapointments:

• Subpar Kundera — good but far from his best
• Followups in some series — Freedom by McCaffrey, Max Quick by Jeffrey
• E. M. Forester — *shudder*
• Time’s Eye by Clarke — seriously?
• Lord of the Rings — so far a bit too meandering and having trouble holding my interest, more importantly not finishing it in the year

On the board for this year we’ve got a couple carryovers to finish from last year — hate that –, highly anticipated Kundera and Marquez, some Rushdie, filling out some Anthony and Resnick, and with any luck get into Chabon and His Dark Materials.  1001 count stands at 63 – Me and 45 -Meggy but she’s gaining on me.  We shall see