Somebody cleverer than I could probably have anticipated this,  but I have discovered that reading is no fun at all when one feels a connected time pressure.

I’ll continue reading for pleasure at whatever rate suits me, and I’ll post my thoughts on here after reading – if only because I think it will be nice to have a record of my readings.

A moment of silence, please, for the passing of a silly idea.

I forgot to say: this week I will be mostly reading A Cure For Cancer by Michael Moorcock.

I really want this outfit

There’s not much one can say about Fear and Loathing that hasn’t already been repeated ad naseum, so I’ll try to be brief.

(note – I failed to be brief)

It’s one of those books you can intend to read for years – in my case easily a decade – and just not… quite… get around to. So much a legend, or a cultural touchstone, that you could be forgiven for forgetting that it’s also a book and the correct thing to do to a book is to read it.

Bizzarely, I think its high cultural status did it nothing but favours for me. Like when I first listened to some early Bob Dylan and discovering that under all the voice of a generation/archetypical hip folk poet business there was a man who could really, really seriously write and deliver songs in a way entirely his own. Maybe I subconsciously expect less of anything fêted but it always delights me to find substance under hype. Let’s blame a life-long interest in computer-games and move on.

The point – and I know this is bad writing but I don’t know how to fix it – the point is that I expected Fear and Loathing to be visceral and meaningful and hold a wonky mirror up to a half-fictional world, and all these other things one hears about it and may even have seen in the film. What I absolutely didn’t expect is how amazingly written it is. Twice it moved me nearly to tears, on behalf of a character whom I couldn’t even bring myself to like.

More than that; it helped me understand the point of view that seventies America (and thus, in consequence eighties America) was sort of shell-shocked, enervated retreat from the collapse of the sixties counter-cultural dream. It helped me see the world from another perspective, is my point, and that’s something only the really good books can do. So it must have been a really good book. QED. Yes.

And it did all this in 204 pages. Which naturally begs the question: who writes all these 800+ pages, first-in-a-series-of-fourteen, fantasy epixxx anyway? I mean… really? Your vision needs 11200 pages to unfold, does it? You and your vision should get a room and stop bothering everyone else, that’s what I say. Pffft.

This one is a mixture of Primus and Secundus in that it is about both self-improvement and tidying up the results of unfettered spending.

You see, I used to be a voracious reader; in terms of words consumed per unit time I probably still am. The problem is that I don’t really read books anymore. Instead I read RSS feeds, magazines and game rulebooks.

This wouldn’t really be a problem at all, apart from silly, snobby reasons but for two things. For one: when I do remind myself to go to bed an hour earlier and read a novel I always enjoy it, and feel jolly good for having done so. For two: the unread books shelf:

I think this is most of them.

You see; my love of buying books hasn’t really adjusted to compensate for the low rate at which I’m reading them these days. Hence these, the rules of Project Tertius:

• One book to be read per fortnight, and rehomed on the shelves with the books I’ve actually read. I’ll also write a wee review, which seems the thing to do.
• Books which are compilations of several books don’t have to be read all in one go, but should be fastidiously marked with a post-it recording which of the books contained have been read.
• Books which are really big (at least 500 pages in regular paperback format) can be read in stages, or allowed more than one fortnight.
• If a book is completed early the timer is reset to a fortnight the following Saturday.
• If a book is intolerably bad it can be abandoned and sold, gifted, or left as a trap for unwary borrowers.
• Project Tertius will conclude when I feel like concluding it.

If anyone reading through all this is concerned I might be taking on too much, they should recall that I have a great deal of free time.