Reading and listening

22/1/22 19:57
darkemeralds: Image of an open book whose pages are turning into wings and flying away (Winged book)

I continue to have trouble focusing on reading. I mean actual reading from a book.

In an attempt to re-corral my attention and recover some of that pleasure, I've

  • Sworn off social media (we'll see how long that lasts...)
  • Joined a silent reading party where twice a month we get together on Zoom and just read for two hours (a form of accountability)
  • Got at least four very different books going (so that when it's reading time, I can pick what I'm in the mood for)
  • Established a couple of comfortable and well-lighted places to read.
So far this year I've finished:
  • Natalie Goldberg's Three Simple Lines (a lovely memoir and rumination on haiku)
  • David Mitchell's Number9 Dream (long novel; I'm aiming to read all his novels in 2022)
  • Ken Mogi's Awakening Your Ikigai (kind of a little philosophy/lifestyle guide)

Currently in progress:

  • Colson Whitehead's Harlem Shuffle (a caper/heist novel)
  • Richard Tarnas's The Passion of the Western Mind (a huge survey of western philosophy)
  • Sean Russell's Moontide and Magic Rise (a really long fantasy that I've been picking at for several months)
  • Matthew Salesses's Craft in the Real World (on correcting some of the faults of the American MFA writing program)
...plus a bunch of audiobooks. I get a ton of reading done via audiobooks, and I'm okay with that, but there's nothing quite like the pleasure of silent, visual reading.

How do others keep themselves reading?

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Finding time to read

26/9/11 16:59
darkemeralds: An old book whose spine reads Signsls and Cyphers, with the text DarkEmeralds (Cyphers)
Stress, weakened eyesight, busy-ness, online activity, sore hands, fanfic, annoyance at technology, an internet-induced attention deficit, and probably a few other things have all conspired in recent years to curtail my reading of books.

Lately, though, I've sort of taken it up again, this book-reading thing. [personal profile] ravurian has heckled me into a bunch of it, actually going so far as to send me books.

I was gonna list a bunch of them here, but then I got all knotted up over fiction vs nonfiction and paper books vs ebooks vs audiobooks, and then I realized that if you count audiobooks, I've never stopped "reading", and if things like lectures and podcasts count as audiobooks, my absorption of material has been pretty good all along.

And of course, if you count fanfic, which...why would you not, really?...well, I read more than I thought I did.

But still, I was sitting up in bed last night with a nice bright reading light on, and a cat nearby, and a real book* in hands whose achy joints I was completely ignoring, and it was really nice.

*Nights in the Gardens of Spain by Witi Ihimaera.
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I kind of broke the archive

12/1/11 10:40
darkemeralds: Jensen Ackles in Regency Attire (Restraint John)
Several people have mentioned wanting to download Restraint in its entirety using one of the handy ebook formats at the AO3. I would like to do this myself, actually. The last time I tried, however, I failed in all formats.

I entered a support request and the lovely support people at the Archive quickly responded that yes indeed, 220,000 words is a longer chunk of long than the export function could handle. As far as I know, the problem isn't resolved.*

SO: I'm going to make my own Mobi, ePub, and plain HTML versions**, probably over the weekend, and figure out how to make them available.

UPDATED TO ADD that I've successfully downloaded the ePub version directly to my Android phone. No luck with Mobi, but I'm not sure whether that's a phone configuration problem or a problem with the AO3-created file.


*If you've discovered otherwise, please let me know. I can't check from work.

**While I'm at it, is there another format I should be making?
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darkemeralds: A round magical sigil of mysterious meaning, in bright colors with black outlines. A pen nib is suggested by the intersection of the cryptic forms. (Default)
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