I recently changed more things on this old web log and one of those changes was a silencing (via its losing place on the header) and trimming (via accepting that I will never be able to remember to keep the "currently reading" up to date) of the reading page. The thing is that I am always reading a lot of books concurrently,[1] I am not necessarily good at accepting when I’m just not going to get around to finishing a book (here’s looking at you, Hypermedia Systems), and since I have no analytics on this site anymore, I have no idea if it’s interesting to anyone besides myself anyway.[2]

Anyway, one of the books I’m reading is Umberto Eco, How to Travels with a Salmon and Other Essays, and it’s a fucking delight. He’s so funny! I mean, I’m very much enjoying The Name of the Rose as a bedtime book, but this shit —

But as I went down to the 16th floor of the WeWork carrying both the Eco and Conversation of the Three Wayfarers (Peter Weiss) to eat my lunch (because Thursdays are the busiest days here and I could not get a comfortable seat on my own floor’s common area), I realized that not only had I brought the Weiss from home and that I keep the Eco (the essays, anyway) on my desk at work, but I have yet another book by my night stand (the other Eco), two in-flight books next to the chair in my home office (A Shock by Keith Ridgeway, The Berlin Wall by David Rice that I’m reading ahead of another interview with him; three if you count the very on-pause Electronic Literature, which I am still determined to finish one of these days), not to mention the audiobooks I’ve got on the Libby app and the O’Reilly app.[3] It’s a lot of books at once! Yet, I might observe:

  • I still typically have only one book per "column" going at a time, i.e., one for-my-"work" fiction book (the Weiss, technically the same column as A Shock but it was due to the library yesterday), one "fun" fiction book (The Name of the Rose), one programming book, one nonfiction audiobook…​

  • They live in fairly separate physical zones, which (maybe) helps me keep them straight? Let’s say this is true.

  • Typically all but the for-my-"work" fiction books tend to be books that are easy enough to pick up and put down without too much worry of remembering.

  • …​and in any case, I am never without something to read.

This is all to say that I have still not found any comp titles for my novel manuscript, and yet despite this, my reading is still so much more for pleasure. Now:[4] to Command-Line Rust!

1. And I have been thinking a lot about "concurrency" of late, but for programming reasons not for literature reasons.
2. If you are interested for whatever reason, I’m trying StoryGraph, though also not necessarily keeping that up to date.
3. Though this I may not finish, but the title was good: Literary Theory for Robots.
4. As I am still technically on the clock.