Open books

01 February 2005 @ evening time | Comments (0)

I have a horrible habit of picking up books and not finishing them. It’s quite likely that this is just one of the few tangilble ways in which my short attention span can manifest itself. I’m quite aware of my tendency toward starting a multi-threaded sentence that just rambles on and on and on…

…like the time I caught the ferry over to Shelbyville. I needed a new heel for my shoe, so, I decided to go to Morganville, which is what they called Shelbyville in those days. So I tied an onion to my belt, which was the style at the time. Now, to take the ferry cost a nickel, and in those days, nickels had pictures of bumblebees on ‘em. “Give me five bees for a quarter,” you’d say. Now where were we? Oh yeah – the important thing was that I had an onion on my belt, which was the style at the time. They didn’t have white onions because of the war. The only thing you could get was those big yellow ones…

So anyways, I’ve got a long list of books that sit waiting to be finished and I’m thinking that by writing them down, perhaps it’ll become more likely that I finish them.

Actively reading:

• Free Culture: How Big Media Uses Technology and the Law to Lock Down Creativity, Lawrence Lessig (finished 2/12)
• Getting Things Done, David Allen
• 1984, George Orwell (finished 3/26)

Sorta reading:

• Hackers and Painters: Big Ideas from the Computer Age, Paul Graham
• Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies, Jared Diamond

Someday will finish:

• Lamb: The Gospel According to Biff, Christ’s Childhood Pal, Christopher Moore
• Cien Años de Soledad, Gabriel García Márquez (sí, ¡en español!)
• Practical Electronics for Inventors, Paul Scherz

Recently finished:

• The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald
• Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, Cory Doctorow
• Neuromancer, William Gibson
• McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern Issue 13, Chris Ware & McSweeney’s

Apparently it’s The-Thing-To-Do nowadays to have a long subtitle accompanying your novel’s title. In any event, it’s pretty clear which books keep me the most interested: geek lit. Now that I physically write this list out, I’m actually shocked that I’ve had time to finish four books in the last month or two (although that’s not saying much; two were under 200pgs, one was a re-read, and one was basically a long — albeit kick-ass — comic book).

So perhaps after I finish reading and getting started with GTD I’ll have more spare time to finish all the other pending literature. It’s also quite likely that I’ll just have so buried myself in organizational minutiae that all that will have changed is my book list’s classifications to @nextActions/@waiting/@someday and I’ll be carrying around a wad of color-coded 3” x 5” cards that make me feel hip.

So back to that onion tied to my belt…