Better Than Dead

There are all sorts of degrees of books, all sorts of reasons for keeping or getting rid of them.

I’ve been doing quite a bit of book purging the last few weeks. Some of the books were those I’d been holding in reserve to lend to a book sharing acquaintance. That relationship has gone south somewhat and I just couldn’t see cluttering up my limited space with books that should have gone into the Recycle bags months ago, ones I had no particularly affinity for keeping. Not necessarily bad books—some I enjoyed quite well—but ones I was fairly certain I’d never read again and had no desire to hang onto.

Others came from my Read-But-Not-Ready-To-Get-Rid-Of bookcase. These resonated with me strongly enough that I couldn’t decide yet if they would become part of the permanent collection or get passed on. Some wait in limbo for years before I make up my mind. I also have The Permanent Collection bookcases and the scandalously large To Be Read bookcases (note the plural). But I’ve begun to face up to the reality of a few things. Namely, that I am not reading books as quickly as I once did.

I used to think I was a fast reader, but I realized sometime past that compared to a number of book lovers on the internet I’m a tortoise. I used to get through between 40 and 50 books a year. Not a blistering pace compared with some of those bookophiles of my acquaintance, but considering that I’m always reading several books at once, not a bad total. Now that my days are so chock full of Things To Do, I’m lucky to get any reading time at all. It takes me about a month to finish an average-length novel, longer still if it’s a behemoth. I’m close to finishing a couple of those several I’m reading, both nonfiction, which takes me considerably longer than a month to get through. So I’m closing in, but not there yet. It could be a few more months…

I may not clear even a third of my old finished total this year.

So I’ve begun eyeing the books in my various bookshelves, with their sundry “keeping codes,” in a different light, asking myself this simple question, “Do you think you’ll get around to reading/rereading this one in this lifetime?” The answer is often a regretful, “No.” Even for some of them in the TBR pile. As interesting as these books are, as primed as I was at the time of buying them or finishing them, I doubt I’ll get to them. Life is shortening up every day, time is a precious commodity, and my living space is over-full. Getting rid of books, albeit regretfully, is one thing I have some control over. If I find somewhere down the line that I really did want to read/reread something, there’s a thriving used book market I can take advantage of.

Yes, I know e-books would solve some of this. Wish I enjoyed reading digitally.

I’m still acquiring new books, though not at the obscene pace I once collected them. Space has to be found in the TBR bookcases. Out with the old, to the benefit of the Venice library. In with the new. Until they become old and I have to ask myself that sad question about them, too.

Nil desperandum. Spero melior.

Random quote of the day:

“Improvement makes strait roads, but the crooked roads without Improvement, are roads of Genius.”

—William Blake, “Proverbs of Hell,” The Marriage of Heaven and Hell

 

 

Disclaimer:  The views expressed in this random quote of the day do not necessarily reflect the views of the poster, her immediate family, Siegfried and Roy, Leonard Maltin, or the Mormon Tabernacle Choir. They do, however, sometimes reflect the views of the Cottingley Fairies.

Random quote of the day:

“Most institutions demand unqualified faith; but the institution of science makes skepticism a virtue.”

—Robert K. Merton, Social Theory and Social Structures

 

 

Disclaimer:  The views expressed in this random quote of the day do not necessarily reflect the views of the poster, her immediate family, Siegfried and Roy, Leonard Maltin, or the Mormon Tabernacle Choir. They do, however, sometimes reflect the views of the Cottingley Fairies.

Here’s what I was concerned about on March 23, 2011. I never posted this, don’t remember why now, but came across it while cleaning up my hard drive. This is still something that concerns me, still a valid question to ask myself, but my life is so much more complicated now—and my creative life so much on hold—that it has slipped down the list of worries.

I have no idea when the Dos Lunas saga will see the light of day, although a member of my “fan base” was inquiring about it last week. I use “fan base” ironically for those who don’t get the quotation marks. When I was generating a lot of these DL stories I had a dedicated band of local readers who really liked them and always asked for more. One of them contacted me Friday to find out why I hadn’t e-pubbed them. I explained that time is not my friend these days and why.

Yet I still hope to do just that one of these days.

And so, last year’s concerns:

So. I’ve got this contemporary fantasy novel that I wrote about a mythical Southern California county by the name of Dos Lunas. I’ve been writing about this place for years, a bunch of short stories, and this is the first completed novel (though I’ve started and hope to finish others). Some of the vast cast of characters who inhabit Dos Lunas are Indians from a tribe called the Kintache, a tribe as mythical as the county they inhabit. I have for some time felt rather sensitive on the subject of cultural appropriation, as in this post, for instance. That’s why, with notable exceptions, I’ve tried to write from the outside in, rather than in the POV of my Indian characters. Being a middle-class white girl, I knew I couldn’t do justice to an Indian POV.

Now, I do have one character, JK Montmorency, who is three-quarters Irish and one quarter Indian. He’s been raised mostly as a middle-class white boy, privileged, taking his life for granted, so I’ve felt comfortable writing from his POV. And I’ve written in this special protection for the Kintache, a mother goddess who walled their valley off from the rest of the world through most of their history in order to protect them from the negative currents of history. They missed out on the Holocaust that visited most of the California Indians when the white men invaded their land in the late 18th century. They observe it happening to the other tribes, and they mourn for it, but they have stood somewhat outside the sweep of history. It’s been my hedge, you see, because most of the Dos Lunas stories are semi-comedic. With serious undertones, sure, but comedy-dramas, and the Holocaust isn’t really a suitable subject for comedy (Roberto Benigni and a different Holocaust notwithstanding).

I thought I was writing something I knew, this serio-comic place called Southern California with its goofy and eccentric ways. But like many things that are silly, there’s a vast reservoir of serious, tragic things just below the surface. I thought I was doing a decent job of reflecting that, too, but I’ve never been without doubt about it.

These days doubts are blossoming and growing, like the wildflowers in Dos Lunas, where it’s springtime at this writing. Reading Sherman Alexie, whom I love, has me feeling desperately inauthentic—and even disrespectful. Above all, I want to be respectful to the real suffering of the real native people of California. But I worry about it constantly. I think I’m being respectful, but what if I’m deluded?

I can only keep on, I suppose, and hope others let me know if I’ve stepped in a big pile of dog shit. Hopefully, with the same care and consideration I’ve tried to have in these stories.

Random quote of the day:

“History never looks like history when you are living through it.”

—John W. Gardner, No Easy Victories

 

 

Disclaimer:  The views expressed in this random quote of the day do not necessarily reflect the views of the poster, her immediate family, Siegfried and Roy, Leonard Maltin, or the Mormon Tabernacle Choir. They do, however, sometimes reflect the views of the Cottingley Fairies.

Random quote of the day:

“Man himself, in his hopes, his desires, his thoughts, and in his emotions seems to be the only unchanged thing in the world.”

—Mary Kay McComas, “Wayward Wizard”

 

 

Disclaimer:  The views expressed in this random quote of the day do not necessarily reflect the views of the poster, her immediate family, Siegfried and Roy, Leonard Maltin, or the Mormon Tabernacle Choir. They do, however, sometimes reflect the views of the Cottingley Fairies.

Random quote of the day:

“Love itself draws on a woman nearly all the bad luck in the world.”

—Willa Cather, My Mortal Enemy

 

 

Disclaimer:  The views expressed in this random quote of the day do not necessarily reflect the views of the poster, her immediate family, Siegfried and Roy, Leonard Maltin, or the Mormon Tabernacle Choir. They do, however, sometimes reflect the views of the Cottingley Fairies.

Random quote of the day:

 

“We’re never truly separate from what we wish for.”

—Kythe Heller, Immolation

 

 

Disclaimer:  The views expressed in this random quote of the day do not necessarily reflect the views of the poster, her immediate family, Siegfried and Roy, Leonard Maltin, or the Mormon Tabernacle Choir. They do, however, sometimes reflect the views of the Cottingley Fairies.