gamerdad I could easily overwhelm myself here by just writing too much and then not reading enough.

It is the first dayof 2025 as I write this and I have set myself the bold goal of reading more. Scratch that. I have set myself the goal of finishing more books.

As it stands I have a lot of novels and non-fiction tomes with bookmarks protruding from them just sitting around. So, I am going to use this site to inventory the act of finishing as many of those as I can and then eventually starting some more.

Here’s the game plan: A post when I start (or jump back into) a book. A post when I finish a book. Simple.

I jumped back into 1Q84 this afternoon. I can’t tell you exactly why I stopped reading it almost exactly half way through, but maybe it had something to do with starting that job and shifting my habits and feeling guilty about reading in my spare time when I should instead be writing. Ironic that. Either way, I had left the whole thing at a kind of climactic moment in the story when one of the narrative threads hits a turning point moment and someone is—dun-dun-daaaaah—murdered. I won’t particularly try to use these posts to spoil things, but needless to say people are routinely killed by a character who is a kind of humble assassin and she is drawn into this complex magical realism narrative where she ends up assassinating a kind of prophet for this group and I closed the book back, well, probably five or six months ago, literally with the cliffhanger words of her jabbing a fatal spike into his neck.

So here I am, and the first book I am going to jump back into (I won’t say finish) is a bit of Murakami comfort-lit, and I can nestle into some quiet moments with this hulking tome of a story resting on my lap with the winter cold freezing the outsides and the story warming me up indoors.

Back at it.