At 34 I found myself surrounded by books, not knowing if I would read anything to completion again.
After working as a scientist for several years, reading non-academic work had become difficult. I had developed a tendency to treat books as resources for extracting bits of information for use in projects.
I decided to pretend that I had never read anything at all. That would encourage me to read books that had rearranged my brain once before, in the hope that they might do so again.
I started with the smallest books on my shelf — like Musil's Flypaper. That I had once read Infinite Jest and The Republic in college was no indicator that I would read anything even a fraction of their lengths again! I am tracking my progress in the table below:
Title | Author | Topic | Pages | Started | Finished |
---|---|---|---|---|---|
Flypaper | Robert Musil | Fiction | 62 | 03-06-24 | 03-06-24 |
Alice's Adventures in Wonderland | Lewis Carroll | Fiction | 154 | 03-06-24 | 06-06-24 |
The Fall | Albert Camus | Fiction | 92 | 06-06-24 | 11-06-24 |
Pedagogy of the Oppressed | Paulo Freire | Teaching | 156 | 07-06-24 | 23-06-24 |
Design as Art | Bruno Munari | Design | 223 | 23-06-24 | 07-07-24 |
Room to Dream | David Lynch | Bio | 506 | 07-07-24 | 25-08-24 |
The Go Programming Language | Donovan & Kernighan | Code | 366 | 25-08-24 | |
Mrs Dalloway | Virginia Woolf | Fiction | 141 | 25-08-24 |