Pages

Thursday, January 1, 2009

2009: looking good, looking good

Oh, bliss. I have spent the first day of the new year reading. And reading and reading, like I haven't in quite a while. One of the pleasures of working in a library is that I get to read for fun and still feel like I'm doing something productive. I was worried, at first, that reading would be "work," and there's nothing that kills fun for me like perceiving something as "work." Even labelling something "productive" can be a kiss of death, if I'm not careful. But today I discovered that reading is still fun. It's more fun. It's better than ever before.

I finished Uncle Tungsten (Oliver Sacks) which I'll review for my weekly tomorrow. I've started Alice, I Think (Susan Juby) which is a nice, light change. I've got both The Frozen Thames (Helen Humphreys) and Reinventing the Sacred (Stuart Kauffman) in the wings. These are pleasure reading. I've also got work reading to do, but I decided to give myself the day off. I have a tendency to burn out on work I love, so I'm going to be proactive and take steps against that starting early.

I think part of what is happening here, and maybe I shouldn't feel so surprised, is that I am replacing one of my forms of entertainment with another. My computer's graphics card, which I worked so hard to replace (up to and including replacing the motherboard) has stopped working. This is a mere slight annoyance normally, but it makes playing my favourite games completely impossible. Which is not necessarily a bad thing. So I've resolved not to replace the card, or the computer, for now... which will leave lots more time for reading. We'll try this out for a while, and see how it goes.

No comments: