Avocadia

In 2011 I had set myself a reading target of 40 books and made it fairly comfortably, despite a period of several weeks where I didn’t read anything. In 2012 I decided to up the target to 50 books. That was my first mistake. I completed it, but at cost.

Some stats though, because I may not be a statistician, but I am a nerd. Those 50 books added up to 18,389 pages, and were read at an average of 12 days per book. Yes, I know, when you multiply that back out it works out to 600 days, but there were several times I had multiple books that had been started, but not yet finished. This resulted in some outliers in the days/book column: Well of Ascension took 166 days, from late March to early September. It probably only took me five or six days, beaded on the first and third books in the series. I started it immediately after the first book, but I had been so disappointed with the nature of the first book, that I bogged down in the early plodding plotting of the second. The Communist Manifesto was started on October 26th and completed on Dec 17, a total of 53 days. For 36 pages, mind you, giving me my lowest pages per day of .68. Paradise Lost took me 81 days as I found the language and blank verse technically difficult.

On the other hand, there were some books that I very nearly inhaled. My average pages per day was 86.04, not speed reading, but not exactly slow either. And then there was American Gods (210.67), We Need To Talk About Kevin (200), The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms (142.34), The Hero of Ages (124.67). I wonder if there is any co-relation between page velocity and the overall rating. The slow books received 3 stars, 2 stars, and 3 stars, while the fast books were 5 stars, 4 stars, 4 stars, and 3 stars. It’s possible, but my cherry picked examples aren’t definitive; I would need to run the kind of statistical analysis I don’t know how to do.

My rating system is fairly simple and meant to convey how well the book has worked as a piece of art to me. A successful work of art has to inspire some sort of emotional reaction from me that’s deeper than cool or anger. It has to make me stop and muse, to think about what I am experiencing. It’s entirely subjective of course. A book that I found completely absorbing and that spoke to me, The Magicians, a very good friend whose opinion I respect completely found quite average indeed. My ratings are:

• 5 I will always own a copy of this as I think it is a very successful work of art;
• 4 I lost or found myself in this book;
• 3 This was a good book;
• 2 This was a bad book;
• 1 I only finished this book because my OCD compelled me to. I wish I hadn’t started it;
• 0 I don’t review books I can’t finish.

This year I gave three 5 stars, sixteen 4 stars, twenty-six 3 stars, four 2 stars, and one 0 star. Turns out I do sometimes review books I couldn’t finish:

I was already getting that old 2 star feeling when Dark Elves were mentioned, and then on page 13:

‘Haha, and without you, old fools, I would have nothing.’ The smile was instantly gone, replaced by thin lips and a narrowed gaze. With a sudden burst of immense speed the mage drew his sword in a silver blur and furiously slammed the blade into Innel’s chest.”

I expect this is the single worst book I will read this year. No stars, and my Cino help the soul of Ben Galley.

My review of The Written, by Ben Galley. He friended me afterwards, although he never actually spoke to me, so one of those ‘fuck you’ friendings. Meanwhile, I haven’t written a book.

In hindsight, setting a target of 50 books was a mistake. It resulted an environment that made reading a daily chore rather than - first and foremost - an enjoyable part of my day. Not always but often enough, reading became more about just finishing the book because I was getting behind track on the challenge, then actually reading the book for the sake of it. Paradise Lost and Beowulf suffered because of this; if not for the challenge I would have restarted Paradise Lost from the beginnig after I finished it, because I simply hadn’t got my head around it the first time.

I’ll still do a challenge in 2013, but I am resetting my expectations. I’ll set it at twelve books. These won’t be the only twelve books I read in 2013, but they’ll be ones that I expect to be challenging, the ones that will be a little hard to read because my brain isn’t used to the form. Or the material, in the vase of Godel Escher Bach, which will totally be one of the twelve.

My book reviews.

• retrospective
• books

This is a renewal.

This is a reboot. And arguably a retcon, given I have thrown away my archives.

This is a new blog, a new avocadia.

I’m wondering why. If you’ve known me for the decade or so I’ve been writing this blog - more off than on - you would probably be wondering why as well. By my estimate I’ve made about ten posts in the last three years. Prior to that, a few sporadic posts over a couple of years and before that perhaps four or five years or irregular, mostly forgettable posts. If I cast my mind back there are only half a dozen posts that I would keep around if I were preserving my archives.

The problem as I perceive it is that most of my blogging output was done out of a sense of obligation to keep it moving, to keep posting something new even if I didn’t really have anything to say: have blog, must post. That’s the root of the many failures of the old avocadia. It was variously pompous or frivolous. It was insincere, humourless - and when it wasn’t, it was invariably not amusing. It was thoughtless, and when I tried to think, it was unoriginal and tedious. Or worse, it I failed to notice that I didn’t know what I was talking about. I didn’t have a sense of who I was. What I wanted to say. This culminated in a handful of posts I made towards the middle of 2009 that I don’t really feel any need to rehash, even if I hadn’t cast everything down the memory hole.

A few sentences ago, I said I hadn’t known what I wanted to say. To be clear, I still don’t, in the sense of having a topic or theme for this blog. I know what I don’t want it to be. I don’t want to continue writing stream of consciousness, usually based on some item of no interest to anybody. Usually not even to me, really. I’d be a fool to say I didn’t want a readership of thousands, but if I did, I don’t really want to be because of a cool finder like Kottke, a topic guru like Gruber, or a thought leader like Anil Dash. If I want anything, it is to contribute columns (err?) of 750 words or so at some regular interval that are interesting, readable, and timeless.

Now that I think about it, if you could read something of mine and conclude that it wouldn’t be out of place within The Magazine then I would be proud of it. I might even frame it :- )

Some meta that I feel compelled to note.

The old avocadia ran on a Ruby on Rails codebase of my own writing that aimed high and fell short on many fronts. Most relevant was that it stopped working. I’m not sure why although I’d hazard a guess it was because it was written five years ago using Rails 2.3, and my hosting service, Dreamhost, just stopped supporting elements of it. Why that would be escapes me, but here we are. I put some effort into investigating why and concluded that I just didn’t care to put the effort into rescuing a codebase I had so little to be proud of. Instead, I rebuilt it, and in short order had a very cut down blog engine that would support only what I needed and wanted. Such a shame it uses a version of Rails that Dreamhost is yet to support. Such a shame I couldn’t even persuade capistrano to deploy it to Dreamhost.

I just don’t have the time or interest in making it work. Instead I am using Octopress. It’s so minimalistic it almost doesn’t even exist. I’m writing these words in Sublime Text and they’ll get saved as a file on my home machine, albeit synced by Dropbox to my work machine, my phone, and my iPad. Eventually use Rake, a Ruby tool, to compile the collection of post files into HTML that can be uploaded to Dreamhost. It’s so primitive; on the other hand, I don’t need to piss my time away making sure a home made engine, or even Wordpress, keeps working. It’s Movable Type, with the admin interface moved down to the command line.

I should grow a neck beard.

Comments. I could support comments. I could use Disqus. It’s just that I don’t think comments are much good. I’d just end up having to police them for spam, trolls, and sundry other annoyances. Comments add nothing and detract so much. The best comment system is email. So email me.

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