Tag Archives: reading

On normalcy and not hitting the panic button…

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For as long as I can remember, every medical professional I’ve encountered told me that I’d feel better if I lost weight. Having lost a not inconsiderable number of pounds, I think they may have sold me a pig in a poke. The fact is, as far as I can tell, I don’t feel any better in February 2024 than I did in February 2023. How much of that is reality versus looking backwards with rose tinted lenses, I couldn’t tell you with any degree of accuracy.

I can say with some confidence that I’m feeling better today than I have since the end of June when all my latest health fuckery kicked off. I’ve worked myself off of being medicated for diabetes. I suspect the next time I see my GP, I’ll be instructed to start back off blood pressure meds. The anxiety, which at times was just about debilitating, has receded into a background hum which mostly crops up when I have the occasional odd ache or pain or when some vital sign pops off with an outlying reading.

Since none of my extremely well credentialed doctors seems to be concerned beyond “continue to monitor,” trying to get my head into a place where I don’t hit the panic button on a daily basis is probably the right thing, but it’s been challenging. Being someone who as a child was perfectly capable of worrying himself sick, this is a bit of a work in progress.

Even if none of that were true, I know I’m feeling better than I was in the summer and fall because my reading pace is picking up. Instead of sitting here in the evening holding a book and idlily flipping pages and being entirely distracted, I’m actually reading, comprehending, and burning through pages. My attention span is coming back. I’m intensely grateful for that… it’s been a long time coming.

Easing towards the baseline…

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It wasn’t a great summer for reading. Honestly, it wasn’t a great summer for anything. From July through September, I had no attention span to speak of. “Long form” TiKToks pressed my abilities to focus. Anything I was trying to get done had to be taken down in extraordinarily short chunks. For someone who normally had the ability to sit down and lose three hours reading a book, it was not an ideal arrangement. Books that would have normally gone back on the shelf inside a week lingered on the nightstand for a month or more.

I’m happy to report that October, even though the 10 days of the great plague, has shown decided signs of the situation improving. I’m nowhere near back to form, but I’m at least finding it possible to sit down for an hour at a clip and really get into something. 

I knew I was off my stride, but I’m just now beginning to realize just how far off I was feeling. I don’t mind telling you that I spent a lot of the summer in full bore worry mode – concerned about my health, wondering when or if I’d stop feeling like hot trash, scared that it was just going to be what post 45th birthday life was going to be. 

None of my issues have really gone away – or even yet been properly diagnosed – but I find that initial fear of the unknown is increasingly giving way to annoyance. I can only assume that’s a positive sign since annoyed is practically my universal default setting. Maybe I’m starting to ease back towards the baseline. 

I’m doing everything the medicos have told me to do, so aside from “wait and see” and showing up for more follow-on testing when it’s called for, it’s well past time to start dragging myself up off the mat… even if my head is stuck firmly on playing out all the possible “what if” scenarios. 

What Annoys Jeff this Week?

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1. Management. I spent the better part of a year beating on AFGE 1904 when they were standing between me and a perfectly acceptable new telework agreement. Don’t think for a minute that I won’t give management the same treatment now that they’re the ones dragging their feet. The new policy was signed and went into force on August 4th. We waited while management called a huddle on the 8th and then dropped our updated packets that afternoon… to be told to wait, hold up, management still has some details to work out. Here we are two weeks later with no word on when or if our little office might decide to comply with the approved organization-wide policy… or any explanation for what’s actually holding up the works this time. Management had almost a year of knowing 95% of what was going to be in this new and improved policy, but from where I’m sitting, it appears to have taken them entirely by surprise and without any plan for how it might work when they were told to execute. File that under disappointing, but not in any way surprising. Until they get around to doing the right thing, I’ll continue to take this and every other opportunity to poke the bear.

2. Rice cooker. I’ve been a long time fan of what is commonly called whole grain – white rice, brown rice, barley, oats. It features on the menu a fair number of times a month – even if only to serve as a bed to sop up whatever sauce comes along with the meal. It’s become more prevalent recently… and I finally gave in and purchased a dedicated rice cooker after many years of grousing that a stand alone machine for rice was just an appliance on the kitchen counter that I didn’t need because doing things on the stove top was perfectly fine. It turns out I was absolutely wrong. That stupid rice cooker is a game changer. I’m both annoyed that I was wrong and that it took me literal years to find that out.

3. Failure to read and comprehend. For the last five or so years, whenever I have been in the office, one of my “key duties” has been to push the button to open the door into our office area. To date, I’ve pushed the button approximately 770 times. The damned bell that rings when someone wants into the area is the kind of obnoxious that you end up occasionally hearing it in your sleep. The good news is that (sometimes) procedures change. For instance, we’re no longer supposed to push the button when people want into the room. Now there’s a much more convoluted procedure they need to go through that doesn’t involve a bell in any way. We sent out a memo… and even put up a large sign, neither of which anyone seems to have read, because now we just have a vestibule full of people grousing about not being allowed inside. Expecting anyone to read and follow directions is probably a bridge too far, so I expect we’ll be back to being glorified doormen before long at all. Whatever. It would just be nice, though, if people occasionally did a little reading for comprehension.

Editorial Note: We were, in fact, back to being glorified doormen less than 24 hours after I wrote up this week’s third annoyance. 

Condition, normality, and the first binge of summer…

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Without consulting the database, I can safely say I have about 1650 real paper books stashed here in the house. It’s an approximately equal division between what I’ve read and what remains in the to be read stack. By the time you pass 800 volumes, calling it a to be read “pile” feels somehow dishonest.

I pulled my copy of Flight of the Intruder by Stephen Coonts off the stack last night. Second edition. Nice clean jacket. And for some reason a strongly penned “x” right there on the half-title page. It’s the kind of thing that makes me wonder what the previous owner was thinking when he did it.

With a handful of exceptions, I don’t tend to have pristine first editions that look precisely as they did when published. I’ve got loads of firsts. Most of them show various and sundry problems. Creased jackets. Bumped boards. Maybe even a bit of water staining for some of the harder to find books. Even so, they’re delightful objects, but often the $20 version of a $200 true first in “like new” condition.

Sometimes I have to remind myself I’m not building a showpiece. I’m building with the intent of actually reading what ends up on my shelves. A library to be used and not just observed. More power to the people who put those together. I don’t have the budget to justify being a collector at that level. A bunch of near fines that I’m not afraid to touch is my sweet spot.

At best I’ve got 25-30 books that should fetch enough to make it worth hauling all the rest away when the time comes. If you’re not approaching the semi-professional or elite levels of collecting, having the whole thing pay for itself is probably just about as good a return as one can reasonably expect – especially when most of my high points have come out of the $2 bin. rather than an auction catalog. I’m sure I still have a few big scores left in me as I paw through thrift shops, charity sales, and the occasional proper antiquarian bookshop if they have something I can’t resist even at full retail.

The three years of COVID slowed me down a bit. So many used book sales were cancelled or postponed never to rise again. Shop schedules shifted to make them harder to get to or closed up altogether. The desire to not deal with the general public in large or small groups was even stronger than usual. Slow rolling my acquisition process isn’t something you’d notice from looking in the stacks. Books have been coming in more or less at the same pace I’ve been reading, so it has been a kind of homeostasis. Next week is the first round of my long awaited summer buying binge, so all bets are off once that gets underway. If the pre-COVID past is prologue, it’s the kind of thing that happens immediately before I start complaining about needing to lay on some new bookcases.

I’m cautiously optimistic that this will be the real summer of “back to normal” for me. I am, of course, using the word “normal” here very loosely.

What Annoys Jeff this Week?

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1. AFGE Local 1904. Here we are 28 weeks past the “end of max telework” and the union, such as it is, still hasn’t come through on delivering the new and improved telework agreement. So, we’re still grinding along with only two days a week like pre-COVID barbarians… as if 30 months of operating nearly exclusively through telework didn’t prove that working from home works. All this is ongoing while hearing stories of other organizations tucked in next door that are offering their people four or five day a week work from home options. It’s truly a delight working for the sick man of the enterprise. I’m sure someone could make the case that there’s enough blame to go around, but since the updated and perfectly acceptable policy for supervisors was published 28 weeks ago, I’m going to continue to go ahead and put every bit of blame on Local 1904 for failing to deliver for their members (and those of us who they “represent” against our will) and for continuing to stand in the way like some bloody great, utterly misguided roadblock. No one’s interest is served by their continued intransigence. The elected “leaders” of AFGE Local 1904 should be embarrassed and ashamed of themselves.

2. Reading. Hey, it’s fundamental! I don’t mean that people need to sit down and read 1000-page doorstops (though I suspect life would be altogether better if they did). There are very few things that agitate the living shit out of me more, especially this time of year, than people who have been given all the pertinent information – via email, or slides, or instant messenger – but who come back a day or a week later and ask the same goddamned question. Asked and answered, your honor. Read the SITREP. Read the briefing. Read the email. I promise the answers you seek are already in there. It has the added benefit of not swamping me in endless discussions of things that should already be common knowledge.

3. Leakers. The press likes to call them “leakers.” It’s polite. It’s inoffensive. By contrast, I prefer to think of them as weak-minded, cowardly treason dogs. Delivering up classified documents to the media or the internet or your very best friend in the world is an act of treason. Full stop. They took an oath, the same one I did, to “support and defend.” If there are issues, there are certainly avenues we can all avail ourselves of to bring them to light. In the last extreme, we are entitled to resign in protest and ring public alarm bells. What a leaker, a traitorous bastard, does, is substitute his or her wisdom for that of everyone else – taking it upon themselves to be the arbiter of what should and shouldn’t be in the public domain. In doing so they betray their nation and worse, they betray their oath. They’re worthy of nothing but our scorn and the deepest, darkest hole the US Bureau of Prisons or United States Disciplinary Barracks has to offer.

The year in books…

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What kind of year it has been, at least around here, can often be measured by a discussion of books. As this year ends, there are 1533 book making up my personal library. I added 113 of them to the shelves this year.

According to the statistics helpfully compiled by Librarything and Goodreads, I’ve read 66 books and 26,080 pages in 2022. That’s a pretty significant drop from last year when I read 79 books and 32,585 pages. The only significant difference year over year comes down to spending the last three months needing to schlep much more often into the office. The commute has stolen six hours a week that was otherwise free and open reading time. It’s obviously thrown me off the pace set in 2020 and ’21. One more reason to be bitter about that whole situation, I suppose.

In any case, the library continues to grow, even if at a slower, slightly more “reasonable” pace. If the internet is to be believed, if I stacked the whole bunch of them atop one another, I’d have a tower of books ever so slightly taller than the Taj Mahal and growing towards striking distance of the Notre Dame cathedral.

Depending on the source, I’ve read that the average U.S. household has anywhere between 30 and 114 books and also that the average individual purchases about 12 books a year. I speculate that average is all sorts of off the mark, being completed skewed by me and like-minded bibliophiles who have a mild affliction for stacking them deep – in my case, reaching the weight of 180 fully grown badgers and needing almost 16 Billy bookcases. That estimate, by the way, is frighteningly accurate at least in terms of bookcases… I don’t have a good point of reference for comparing the badgers, though.

I started off thinking one room here could be a library. The reality is that it’s more like a living thing – growing, evolving, and spreading out through the house. I don’t think I’d want it any other way. 

Six months to bend the curve…

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I managed to sneak away from the homestead the Saturday before last to do a bit of old school book shopping. It felt good to be back on the hunt through towering stacks of warehoused volumes. I knew I didn’t find anything wildly rare or collectable. That’s the trouble with buying from book people. Even those who trade at the wholesale level, despite the massive number of items on their shelves, know what they have… and have probably paid someone to cull the stock for things that shouldn’t be sold off at half of their marked price. Still, filling a basket or two at Second Story Books is among one of life’s great pleasures. Their stock is unpredictable, but I never fail to walk away with items that close gaps in my collection or that will simply be a pleasure to read.

The real shock to my bookish system came when it was time to catalog my new finds and get them loaded up onto the to be read shelves. Thanks to the requisite poking around on Goodreads and LibraryThing, I learned that I’ve fallen significantly off the pace. By the mid-point of 2020 and 2021, I’d read about 40 books. This year, I’ve notched only 25. Those were Plague Years, of course, so it’s possible I’m simply reverting to the mean now that the world has stumbled along being open for business again. In 2018 and ’19 I was reading about 60 books a year so I’m on track to get close to those numbers.

In any case, I’m feeling that I’ve inexplicably let myself get distracted and not at all happy with the meager numbers I’m putting up. The to be read stack grows far too quickly to let the number of books being read slip too far. The solution, I think, is obvious… I’m going to have to quit being a post-plague social butterfly and get back to the ease and comfort of the days of “safer at home.” I’ve got six months left to bend the curve in the right direction.

Information worth knowing…

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For the last few years, I’ve been using Goodreads to manage my personal library. It’s a solid app, filled with reasonable functionality, and absolute scads “social” elements for readers and tie ins with most of the popular social media platforms. For basic cataloging, it filled the bill without much trouble. Still, at its heart, Goodreads is a social media platform and I found it increasingly limited when trying to tweak my ever-increasing pile of books.

Over the last couple of weeks, I’ve been slowly transitioning over to LibraryThing and working through how to catalog and manage the books over the long term. I’ve finally gotten most of the basics covered – or at least got things broken down into the primal chunks. What I’ve read (763), what I have on the to be read pile (657), and what I still want to get my hands on in the future (207). The latter bit is certainly not an exhaustive list, but it will help me be a bit more selective and targeted as I hunt books in the future.

The next step is taking those big chunks and starting to build a little more granularity. Being able to drill down into more detail than just “History, Britain,” will be when I get an itch for something from a specific time period or topic. Getting the details sorted, though, looks like a project that could easily take months or years as I pick at it in free moments. Getting the level of detail I’d like to have will mean moving past the bulk edits of the last few weeks and dealing with smaller subsets and even individual touch points. It’s going to take time, but it feels like I’ve finally stumbled on a proper cataloging tool to really start getting a grip the collection from top to bottom.

Yes, it’s probably overkill, but I have every expectation that this bunch of books will continue to grow over the next 20-30 years. Coming to terms with how to keep it all straight (and avoid buying duplicates) feels like a worthwhile endeavor. Plus, if I hadn’t made the transition, I wouldn’t know that my stack of books is now just slightly shorter than the Taj Mahal. That’s information worth knowing. 

Normal again…

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Being sick is, by popular consensus, not fun. The worst symptom of my recent crud was an achingly short attention span. I couldn’t focus on anything. As a result, TikTok became my best friend. Thirty to 60 second clips were manageable and, if not exactly entertaining, helped pass the time. I usually read away whatever down time I find, but getting through more than a page or two at a sitting was pure agony. Even when I forced it, I couldn’t remember what happened two paragraphs in the past.

The old reliable focus has slowly come back over the last few days. In fact, last night was the first time in two weeks that reading wasn’t misery. The words spooled out, pages turned, and whole chapters were swallowed up by the evening. This morning I was even able to remember that ground I covered. It’s a relief. 

Being able to comprehend complex ideas and story lines is a profoundly underappreciated skill. I didn’t realize how much I’d miss that until I couldn’t do it.

Hooray for being “normal” again.

Culling the stack…

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Before I fell ill with whatever crud wore me down after Christmas, one of the major items I managed to knock off my to do list was culling the to-be-read shelves. You can count on one hand the number of times I’ve willingly let things fall out of the collection. Buy enough books over enough years, though, and things have a way of accumulating. Despite your best efforts, some of those things turn out to be real dogs. 

I’ve never been shy about buying a nicer volume to replace something I already have on the shelf, so some of them were duplicates I was happy to move elsewhere. Occasionally I’ll look at something occupying shelf space and realize no matter how much time I have, I’m never going to read it. I hate to admit it, but when you start approaching 2000 volumes in your average home, space starts to become something of a premium. That’s all a way of saying that even for me there are good reasons to sometimes get rid of books.

I filled the back seat of the truck with my culls and cast offs. I’d waited until the volume justified taking a minor road trip. The local shop might have offered a few dollars for the lot – hardly worth going there versus just donating the bunch to Goodwill. I don’t blame the local shop owner. He knows his business and that he’s the only game in town when it comes to buying used books. Judging from the unopened boxes sitting in his aisles and stacked in every foot of space the fire marshal will let him get away with, getting inventory is never a problem.

The trade off with taking my batch on the road is that I’m sure to spend far more filling the gas tank than I’ll recoup from selling everything I’m hauling with me. There was nothing special or rare in the mix and the return on most used books is pennies on the dollar. It’s just part of the obsession that you accept when you’re into it deeply enough.

Knowing I wouldn’t even recoup my travel cost was worth it though, to hand them off to a proper bookman at one of the great east coast used book shops. They’ll get most of these good reading copies placed into the hands of someone who will appreciate them. Better that than dropping them somewhere where they’ll inevitably end up turned to pulp in the hands of a paper recycler.At my level of collecting, it’s not about turning a profit. With the exception of a few high points, all I’ll manage to do is make sure most of the books here are able to survive another generation or two into the future. If I’m lucky, one or two of them might survive to have a bicentennial and find their way into the hands of someone who loves them like I have. That’s not bad compensation for the time, effort, and expense.