It’s been a while since I’ve put anything up here. I don’t really regret it, but it is something I think about often. There are a variety of better and worse reasons and excuses for this (among the better: what do I owe anyone in this regard?), but when I stopped doing as much social media stuff I’d planned to do more of this kind of stuff and that hasn’t happened, but fine: maybe I’m becoming a more private person. Perhaps this is related to the pandemic, perhaps it’s not, perhaps it’s entirely untrue in any case.

Ostensibly, however, I have a reading page which is horrifically out of date at the time of writing (though hopefully it’ll be updated when this post goes up, if I get around to it). And I’ve been thinking about my reading in a sort of "meta" way. I still don’t read "right," exactly, i.e., I don’t necessarily read for pleasure (or at least: what I find pleasurable isn’t often what one is supposed to find pleasurable in reading, at least according to certain folks I talk to books about). I most often — and this was particularly true in grad school — read kind of ruthlessly, reading primarily for things to steal or borrow or to rip the thing apart and try to understand how it all gets put back together. I think that’s why I like books like La Maison de Rendez-Vous and Exteriors so much.^[1]

But as grad school fades ever-farther into the distance I find myself doing a lot more "professional reading." I’m reading programming books, and sort of "high-level" programming books. I am in the weeds and looking out at the forest and the fields. About Ruby and Python, fiddlefucking with Docker. All I didn’t want to do when I was a teenager was grow up and do computers like my dad had did but that’s there the money is and so there I’m heading slowly but. Suffice to say it’s a different kind of reading. More blogs than short stories. Ripping things apart means mostly skipping prose to look at code samples. Structure means how well (or, often, poorly) the pedagogical points are made. I don’t hate it, but it does make me feel somewhat adrift of the thing that I thought I was trying to do with myself.

I mean, I’m still reading (scare quotes) "good books." I’m even still reading poetry, having finally finished The People, Yes (which I’m glad I took my time about in the end) and having finally started checking out this Larry Levis person that people have been telling me to read for years (and holy shit, man, he’s great). I’m sort of trying to resuscitate a reading group that exploded with a friend (is it a group if it’s only two people?) by reading Dead Souls, a return to the 19th c. Russians whom I loved in high school and whom I promptly thereafter stopped reading (yes: I know that Gogol was Ukrainian but like my Granddad who also came from Ukraine it was really just Russia then).

(My coworker said something funny and now I’ve lost the thread entirely. This is a joy and a minor annoyance of being in the office, but goodness knows I prefer it. And now we’re talking about the merits of Megadeth’s "Hidden Treasures" album. So I’m going to stop here, I think. But the point is that things keep changing and my reading is starting to feel more disjoint than maybe it’s been since high school — where I was doing all of calculus, chemistry, English, history, music theory, whatever else all at once — but I guess that’s just a part of the gig, and I do mostly enjoy it, and as the reading comes so does the writing, even if I’m writing probably more lines of code than of prose these days, but what can you do, what can you do, what can you do?)