Current Reads

See that thing to the left? The one that says, “Current Reads”? And beneath, two book titles? Notice it hasn’t changed in a long while? Something like two months?

Well, I am ashamed to admit, in the hustle and bustle and general crazy-hectic-nicity of the past month or so, I haven’t been reading them. Well, that’s not entirely true. Perhaps a better confession may be to state that I’ve read my Current Reads about once a week. At about ten minutes a pop.

A worst sin is that I’ve been adulterous. With other titles, that is. It’s a baseline trait of being a hopper. I’ve been visiting libraries, large anonymous local book retailers, and those fantabulous used book stores the aforementioned large anonymous local book retailers are trying to put out of business. Visiting them after dark. With the collar of my trench coat up, hat pulled down over my eyes.

Maybe I can rationalize here. Transformation … is about four hundred pages long. And Cryptonomicon – Egad! Is that 1,140 pages (as I flip through the three-inch-thick paperback to the ending)? It is! And my bookmark is firmly stuck on page 808. Oh dear.

What have I been reading instead? What is the lure of these libraries and bookstores? Hmmm. Let’s see … Oh, all right. Here it is: Post-modern philosophy, a 1920’s overview of poetry, UFO abductions, the Apollo Space Program, possible paradigms of life that might be found in this big ’ol universe, natural cures and the raw food diet, Bill James and his pluralistic universes, the JFK assassination, Jesus by Pope Benedict. And that’s only the past two weeks.

But, true to hopper form, I never read any of these cover-to-cover. (Well, the exception is Pluralistic Universe, which I am half-way through my fourth read, in order to blog about it from at least a minimally knowledgeable perspective.) Five minutes here, five minutes there. In bed before lights-out. While my daughter is taking a semi-supervised bath. In the car at lunch time. You get the idea.

Well, I’ve reformed. As of this past weekend. Yes, I’m sleep-deprived from the new baby. Yes, there’s still so much to be done on the house. Yes, our schedules are in upheaval. But I vowed to stick to and finish these books in the Current Reads thingie and put two new ones up. I cashed in 31 pages of Crypto yesterday, and about half as much of Transformation. I want to prove to myself that I did not bite off more than I can … digest.

A little over three hundred pages to go in the Stephenson book. Then, a review. It’s genuinely an entertaining read, albeit slightly too long and too focused on minutiae. The payoff better be damned near inflationary, and I’m referring to the explosive super-exponential growth of the early universe. And after the review, I have about two dozen high-quality (or at least “high-interest to me”) SF books to devour. And most under two hundred pages.

As far as non-fiction goes? Not sure what’s on deck. I think I need a break from philosophy and religion. Perhaps something scientific: physics or math. Possibly something historical. Maybe something far-out, weirder than UFO abductions and more paranoid than JFK assassination theories.

But one thing that it most definitely will be: blogable.