The Pile |
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26 November 2023
For as long as I can remember I have read multiple books at a time. Perhaps it started when I was about ten and started tackling thicker, drier books like The Bible and my dad's college accounting textbook. I alternated with lighter fair, like Arthur C. Clarke novels. At least that's when I first recollect it. During college the pile got so big including textbooks that it took several trips to move it from room to room. Since then I've tried to keep it under ten. The current pile is nine, but I'm also reading an ebook about the Rust programming language. Less than or equal to I suppose. I also currently read one or two of the weekly Economist magazine a month and peruse the weekly Zürcher Oberlander newspaper for local happenings and to practice my Deutsch. Some of these books have been in the pile a long time, but I don't want to give up on them. Roald Amundsen's logs from the south pole expedition for example. I picked it up on a trip to Fram museum when I went ot Oslo for a baseball game back in 2020. It's unedited and in Amundsen's own idiosyncratic way of writing Norwegian that often veers off into Danish and sometimes English. I've made it about half way through.
Most of the other books were acquired and started this year minus two exceptions. The book on Japanese I picked up at McKay's a decade ago or more in Tennessee, but it's been in my tsundoku pile a long time. But I can actually write つんどく now, at least in Hiragana, since Iwona and I have been learning Japanese on Duolingo this past month in preparation for potentially taking a trip to Japan next year to walk their Buddhist pilgrim route, the Kumano Kodo. The other exception is the business book, which I picked up last year before starting at Ailly but then accidentally left in Raciborz last year. So I didn't get to finish it until this Summer and I want to do a detailed blog on it before I shelve it.
Looking at these books, you can see they're a good cross section of my current interests. I probably won't finish all of them this year, but if I finish half then this will be my second highest number of books read in a year. I still don't know how I managed so many in 2003, but I remember long afternoons at the pool with the girls swimming while I read. That was also the year I took the class on the Gothic language, which sent me down a rabbithole of history where I think I read every book on the history of the Goths in the Georgia State library. And a lot of other history books it seems looking back at the list. Even a couple books on Switzerland made it in that year! Little did I know that 20 years later I'd be living there.
