May Books

I’m really being a lot more irregular with posting than I’d like.  I’m working on it!  May has not been a month with a regular schedule for me, and I’m having to work hard on building one.  I need to learn how to do this better, to use my time properly when I have an open schedule and large ongoing projects — this, after all, is the reality of a writer’s life, if you manage to go full time.  Even if you don’t, it’s the reality of large parts of the academic’s life, that flexibility which can be stultifying if you’re not careful.  When I have a lot to do and short deadlines, things get done.  When I have a lot to do and totally open deadlines, less gets done.  This is a problem for me.  The fact that I have had irregular travel in the last few weeks doesn’t matter; there are always going to be things that break up the home routine.  I am not totally irresponsible, but I can definitely learn to be better about this.

I have been writing for Gail Vaz-Oxlade’s “Other Voices” blog on Fridays for six months.  I have agreed to keep going another six months; that regular weekly writing on a set topic (personal finance, loosely understood) has been an excellent discipline.  (It’s also helped with my financial discipline, but that’s a topic for that blog more than this!)  I have plans to start a regular weekly series on A Pattern Language, which is going to be on Mondays, I think, starting next week.  That way, once the fall term starts, I can still spend some time on the weekends exploring Halifax.

This month I read:

• Smokescreen, Dick Francis
• Reflex, Dick Francis
• Risk, Dick Francis
• Decider, Dick Francis
• Grace (Eventually), Anne Lamott
• Long-Forgotten Arts, Book Three
• As You Like It, William Shakespeare
• The Complete Adventures and Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
• The Return of Sherlock Holmes, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
• The Hound of the Baskervilles, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
• Son of the Mob, Gordon Korman
• Hot Money, Dick Francis
• An Everlasting Meal, Tamar Adler
• The Restaurant at the End of the Universe, Douglas Adams
• The $100 Startup, Chris Guillebeau
• Peter Pan, J.M. Barrie
• Life, the Universe, and Everything, Douglas Adams
• The Moonstone, Wilkie Collins

Pleasingly, only An Everlasting Meal and Long-Forgotten Arts (about making baskets, driving horses, etc.) were from the library; the rest of the new ones were ones I already owned, with the exception of The $100 Startup, which was a new purchase.