First, thanks to anyone kind enough to have read my recent posts. You'll remember I missed Seattle's huge bookstores and the variety of material available. What was I doing last night from 9 to 11 pm? Yes, that's right, late at night I was cruising the aisles of Barnes & Noble I've been jones'in for a book fix for months and I'm sorry but Exclusive Books doesn't cut it. I've been meaning to read Paul Graham's Hackers & Painters for a long time, so I bought myself a copy on the spur of the moment (just because I can) along with about 100$ worth of other titles. Oh, and I have stacks of packages from Amazon piling up where I'm staying. Perhaps these will sustain me for the next few months in Cape Town. I just hope I can get them all home through customs.
But, my self-indulgent buying spree isn't really the point of this post. While I triaged my purchases and matched them up against the books I brought to read on the plane, I realized something - I'm judgmental and I have an unconscious system of categorization. I bet you do too.
Here's mine:
I dynamically promote and demote between these categories. If there's a hot idea of the moment, I'll buy the book, put it in my bag (in which there's a finite amount of space) and bump something currently there. Here's the dilemma: sometimes that means I don't finish the book that got bumped. Wasn't it the "hot idea" just a week before? Yeah, I'm fickle. I have a room full of half-finished books. I need to solve that problem, but my dynamic system is a subconsious way of addressing the really big, important problem of LIFE: You have a finite amount of time to absorb new ideas. You only get one shot. A friend of mine once had me do the back-of-the-napkin arithmetic using the number of free hours in the day, and the number of hours it takes me to read a book and I calculated the rough number of books I'd read over the rest of my lifetime. DEPRESSING. Seriously depressing. I love to read and I read and learn pretty quickly. Still, the wave has long ago crested over me and kept going. I'm only capable of slowly paddling along, trying to keep up with the constant flow of information. Somewhere inside, I feel a strange pity for those who aren't even doing that.
Posted by cbrown at August 15, 2005 5:22 AM