For the first time in my life, I think I’m getting sick of reading. Maybe it’s just bad selection of books right now — I’m stuck in the middle of three different books1 — and I just can’t seem to find any traction with any of them. Maybe it’s that in 2017, I absolutely crushed my reading goal for that year, and that this year I hit my goal of 55 books with about six weeks to go. That’s a lot of time spent reading. Maybe it’s my ongoing effort to get a bunch of my other geeky projects wrapped up so I don’t have that psychic weight hanging over me. Or maybe I’m just playing too much Civilization 6.
Whatever the case, I’m currently fried when it comes to the written word. And that’s both new and strange for me. Oh, there’s books I’m looking forward to reading, and some of them are coming out in a month. But I also feel an obligation to slog through the remainder of the three I’m currently reading.
It’s not that they’re bad books. The one on git is really good — it’s one of the Book Apart series, which are always both solid and succinct. I can probably slog through the remainder of it in a day or two, if I can find the time. As for Woodward’s Fear — that book is just pissing me the fuck off. I can read a few pages and then I’m so angry, I have to put it down. And Pullman’s Daemon Voices, while solid, is getting a little heavy for me with the stuff on Paradise Lost, which is an experience I am hesitant to repeat for reasons I won’t delve into here.
This might be the first time I set up a really low goal for number of books to read in a single year. I think for 2019, I’m going to cut my goal back to 35 or 40, and maybe just read stuff that’ll be fun for me — lots of science fiction and biographies. We’ll see. That might get old quick.