Restart: Reading!

I’ve always loved reading.  It’s my ideal vision of a vacation, or even just a day off, to curl up with a good book.  This feeling has only increased in the last few years now that I work at a library.

But somehow I’ve ended up with the idea that reading is “leisure” and thus you’re not supposed to do it until all your “non-leisure” chores are done.  Which, of course, they never are.  So I haven’t read nearly as much as I’d like in recent years (ok, that’s not the only reason, too many other things competing for even my “leisure” time, and me having “issues” with time management all had their role).

Last winter, I started a project that combined reading and decluttering — I planned to read twenty books over the course of the winter — twenty books I own, that are sitting on my shelf, but that I don’t think I’ll feel the need to keep after I’ve read them.  I know, some people simply cringe at the idea of ever getting rid of a book.  I certainly have my “library” of books I don’t ever plan to part with — reference books, and books that define me — that a new acquaintance could see upon my shelf and *know* me through them.  But, ahem, I have plenty of books that don’t fit that category.  And my brand of minimalism spurs me to scan my shelves regularly and try to keep shrinking the pile, or at least keep it from growing bigger.

I didn’t get far last winter — my life was overturned at the beginning of the year by the end of my relationship and my move into temporary housing and then into a rental.  I’m a very slow recoverer, mentally, and even though I might have used reading as a good distraction or escape during that time, I didn’t.  So I read a whopping TWO books from my declutter list last winter. (Of course, I read several other books lent from friends or from the library, but only two from my project.)

Now I’m ready to restart my project.  I’ve actually pulled twenty books from my shelves and set them into a pile.  One of the books I’m in the midst of now, will count (The End of Nature, by Bill McKibben).  I’ll add the titles and authors, as I progress, to the blog sidebar — first in the Currently Reading section and then in the Recently Read section.  According to the self-generated rules of this project, once I start a book I can of course decide to keep it.  If I decide to keep it, I might finish reading it anyway (in which case it counts as one of the twenty) or I might abandon reading it in order to focus on reading books I can give away (the reading part is important to me, but the real motivation is the declutter part).

And of course, I will keep reading other books as well.  One book I devoured so fast I didn’t get to put it on the blog sidebar until just recently, was called The Last Season, by Eric Blehm.  It’s the true story of a backcountry wilderness ranger in the High Sierra — what drove him to live his unusual life, how he became an expert in “search and rescue” when a backpacker would become lost or missing.  And then, when the ranger himself goes missing while on patrol, the search, conducted by his peers, for him.  I really liked the book, but then again, I know people very like the ranger and others depicted, so I felt like I was reading it from <almost> an insider’s perspective.

Currently, in addition to The End of Nature, I’m reading Forty Signs of Rain by Kim Stanley Robinson.  I learned of these books (it’s the first in a trilogy) when David on the LessIsMore yahoo list posted an excerpt from Fifty Degrees Below (the second book in the trilogy).  The excerpt was this:

“they thought they were temperature tough-guys, but really they were just indoors all the time. They used their buildings as clothing, in effect, and heated or cooled these spaces to imitate what clothing did, no matter how crazy this was in energy terms.- – But they did it without thinking of it like that, without making that calculation. In the summer they wore blue jeans in imitation of what people three generations before had seen in Marlboro ads. – - Blue jeans were the SUVs of pants, part of a fantasy outdoor life…. Now as it got colder people still wore blue jeans, which were as useless in the cold as they were in the heat. Frank meanwhile
[living outdoors] shifted piece by piece into his mountaineering gear.”

I thought it sounded interesting, made a mental note, then thought no more about it.  Until a month or so ago, when Fifty Degrees Below showed up in a box of paperbacks donated to the library.  I snagged it and set it aside for me to read first.  Then I realized that when books are in series, I really like to read them in order.  So I submitted my request for Forty Signs of Rain, and it showed up on Friday.

Then, also, R has lent me his recently-finished copy of Ivan Doig’s Bucking the Sun.  Back when we were living together, he recommended Doig’s English Creek to me, and I really enjoyed it.  So when he said he was enjoying Bucking the Sun, I figured I’d like that too.  I haven’t started it yet though — just got it from him today, and I think I need to finish at least one of the others first — three books at once is a bit much for me right now.