A New Start

Last post was mid-2015. Did I miss anything interesting?

Regardless, I'm back.

So what's in store for the website? I'll be weighing in on travel, literature, food, and music. Possibly a podcast and some music of my own as well. Politics? Some. I do a lot of ranting and arguing on Facebook, so maybe this can be something different - a place where I don't do that.

The real goal is just to keep me writing on a regular basis (writing non-work material, that is). Towards that end, I'm about to start working my way through the list featured in this book, with updates as I finish each book.

1001 Books? That's a lot of books!

Yea, by my estimation, I've already read 10-15% of the books listed here (and started several others), and I'm not planning on rereading them all, so that saves a bit of time, right?

But I also travel a lot, and when I'm not travelling I have a pretty long commute, so I'll be taking advantage of that as well.

So how is this going to work?

Well, here's the deal: I prefer to read in hard-copy when I can, but I'm not about to go out and buy all of these books if I don't have to. I'm also pretty low on space - I've got a pretty big library, and it includes several books on this list that I was already planning to read (or finish).

What's interesting about the "1001 Books..." is that the books are listed oldest to newest by publication date. This means that basically the whole first half of the list is all in the public domain (i.e. free or super cheap as e-books). So what I'll probably do is run two simultaneous tracks, one for e-books, and one for hard copy. I'll start the e-books at the beginning, and I'll pull the hard copies off my own shelf pending availability. That'll work for at least a few months, and if I come up with a better system, I'll update you all here.

[Sidenote: I"m using the 2008 edition (as opposed to the 2006 or 2010 editions, which vary somewhat). All three lists can be found here.]  

First two books:

"Aesop's Fables" (e-book) and Stendhal's "The Red and the Black" (which was on the shelf nearest my bed, so...why not?). 

Onward!