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Sunday, September 27, 2015

Huzzah for getting fitter

Bought a bike, second-hand, took it for a spin. Didn't keel over and die. Hurray!

Repeat.


Thursday, September 24, 2015

Sad face post

I've been putting off writing this post for months, because it makes me sad to think about it, and once you write something down it becomes concrete and there's a kind of finality to it. But for whatever reason, today - today is the day, then.

Over the past year, I have been slowly making peace with the fact that I am beginning to move away from collecting hard copy books. There are a number of reasons for this, and let me stress here that these are personal reasons and I am not trying to convince anyone of anything.

Firstly, for environmental reasons. I realise that deforestation for the feeding of cattle is a much bigger problem than pulping for making books - hell, if people read as much as they ate meat, I reckon we'd have a much better society overall. But the paper industry is also a pollutant, but I am not getting into that here.


Secondly, I want to travel more, and have been steadily pulling myself from a life in which material possessions restrict me from doing so. I realise that things can be put in storage, but without going into long, boring-ass details about why I would rather not do so, I'll just say that I think this is my next phase in the Campbell/Jungian cycle and leave it at that.

ZEN, BITCHES.

I still have a small collection of books (see the pics here) and I'm not sure how many of them I will actually be able to get rid of. Probably none. I need some physical books around me as a buffer against the outside world.


Do I believe we should entirely switch to digital books? Emphatically, NO. I do not nearly trust digital mediums the way I trust inked text on a piece of paper - and here I am talking in the context of cataloguing. I also do not at all believe that printed books' days are numbered. Dark Regions Press, for example, just completed a tremendously successful Kickstarter funding a new collection of short fiction HERE. In short, the campaign required 25K and raised 41K. People clearly still want to read physical books.

This has in no way been an easy decision for me. Books have been integral to my life for as long as I can remember - more so than people, in a sense. I smell books. I put other things on top of a book if it unnerves me because I believe in their power.

Sunday, September 13, 2015

Good reads

The Red TreeThe Red Tree by CaitlĂ­n R. Kiernan
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Some of the most beautifully uncanny prose I have read this year. America's haunted past comes to life to sink its claws firmly into the present, reminding us that some things are too powerful to ever run away from.

View all my reviews