Required Reading

I love Bookmooch.  Give old books.  Get new books.  Keep the post office busy.  Everybody wins!

Except that
a) I am very bad at remembering to send out books and
b) I am very bad at reading the books that I get.

The front page of I Should Be Writing has a list of links on the side called "What I've Read in '09" and I believe in a podcast earlier in the year she mentioned that the point of the list was to keep her honest and keep her reading.  I think it's a great plan, because currently there are 33 books I've read and 34 that I have not, excluding reference-style books.  So I've read almost exactly half of them.

But thanks to BookMooch the half that I have not read is a continually growing stack, and I read (off-line) less and less these days, which is something I should really be mending.  It's already halfway through the third month of 2009, and I'm only halfway through my second book of the year.

The first of the year was Chuck Klosterman's Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs, a novel--well, more like a collection of essays--viewing the world through pop-culture-colored lenses.  Oddly I can't blame BookMooch on this one.  A friend accidentally bought two copies (I am not sure how this happens) and gave me the extra, figuring (correctly) that I'd like it.

The second that I am just over 50% through is Ellen J. Langer's Mindfulness which is actually a psychology book about how mindlessness turns otherwise smart, reasonable people into complete idiots.  Some of the details of the individual experiments get a little dry, but otherwise it's a very interesting read.  This was actually in the free books section of the English department...a bookshelf which is slowly fighting BookMooch as a source of free books I haven't read.

I rarely read non-fiction.  It's kind of weird that it's all I've read book-wise so far this year, but that'll be changing soon, since the next book will be An Abundance of Katherines which Melissa is making me read because it needs to go back to textbook rental by the end of the semester.  Sigh.  Always with the deadlines.

The Planning Stage

Originally, I had planned on writing this entry from the Cellar, so that I could comment on how once-upon-a-time I frequently (okay, occasionally) posted from there but according to my archives, the last time I did was December of 2007.  But the wireless internet there hated me, so instead, I'm coming to you live from an empty auditorium where I'll be taking an exam in about an hour.

Things are changing.  In just over a year, I'll be married.  Yesterday I reconnected with a friend who bought a house a year ago.  My primary mode of communication with many of my friends is Facebook.

I'm still in school.  That doesn't seem like it'll ever be changing.

This summer I'll be starting up another writing project.  But this too, will be different.  Mostly because I'll be going through with it (and this will largely be due to the fact that I will be doing it for class credits as an independent project).  I'm not going to go over the details here, but it'll essentially be a human interest column that I'll be writing, editing, and publishing online.  Most importantly of all, it'll be a nice test to see if I really could be cut out for the writerly life.

I have two smaller projects that I hope to finish by the time summer hits--nothing quite so far-reaching as my silly idea to write a novel last summer.  The first is the War on Procrastination saga I've been putting up on Facebook; I try to update it at least every two weeks, and another one will be going up tonight or tomorrow.  The second is a short story that I would like to finish and submit to a podcast.  At this point with my writing, I'm more concerned with getting my writing to a level that it could be published (in some form) than getting payment for it.  If I'm lucky, that part will come later. 

In closing, blah blah changing blah blah write more blah blah more posting blah blah blah.