It would seems most of us are probably not doing any of the normal things we were doing only a month ago, or, if we are, we are struggling through them. The only two things that have remained consistent for me are work (I’ve always worked from home) and my daily walks. Beyond that my regular routines are in disarray. My reading habit has suffered greatly as I get distracted and lose patience almost immediately after opening a book. In fact almost anything that requires extended concentration has been near impossible to do and I frequently just put things off. (I’m putting together this newsletter on Sunday evening after days of procrastinating.) I have found it far easier this week to occasionally work on my website, which I have over the course of the week managed to update so that I can now publish the occasional post, one of which I link to below, because it amounts to little more than tinkering in between scrolling through Twitter and unhealthily checking the United States Coronavirus Statistics from Worldometer. I try not to be too hard on myself. If ever there was a time to forgive ourselves for mindlessly passing the time, it is now.
Speaking of which, when I first started reading fiction again last year, it was closing in on the end of the 2010s and there was an explosion of lists of the best books of the decade. I spent a lot of time collecting these lists and from them creating my own TBR list of novels. This gradually extended to finding lists of the best short novels and novellas, because I’ve always enjoyed the form. This week I pulled some of the best lists I had found from my browser bookmarks and created a page on my website that serves as a meta list of lists. I plan to keep this list updated as I expand what I read.
In the same vein, I found this thread on the subreddit, /r/suggestmeabook, that listed sites to get reading suggestions to be particularly helpful. It listed some new-to-me resources for helping to discover new books and authors. The ones I found that were new to me and the most useful were:
- Literature Map allows you to search for an author and it then gives back a set of results in the form of a mind-map. For example, I typed in Cesar Aira and it gave me back a pretty large list of authors, some of whom I didn’t recognize. The only issue I had is that it doesn’t give you much context as to why the authors were associated with the author given, but it gave me to plenty that I can explore and research to understand the connections on my own.
- Whichbook provides a set of 12 dichotomies of which you can choose four that you can weight to one extreme or the other (e.g. happy vs sad, short vs long). It then recommends books based on those criteria. The recommendations are a bit hit-or-miss, but it’s fun to play around with.
I've made a bit a progress on my reading challenge since that last time I shared what I have read this year, so I will share it again this week.
That's it for this week. Good luck and take care in the coming week.