Restoring the Reading List

So about a year and a half ago, I said that I was going to stop updating most of my lists because they weren’t really adding any value for me.  The main reason for this was that I was pretty much creating physical stacks of all the things that I was reading or watching and so it was easier for me to simply refer to the stack instead of referring to the list.  And that still seems to be true … except for one list, the Reading List.

It’s not that I can’t manage this list through the stacks.  If anything, it’s the one area where I pretty much run it entirely through stacks, because I tend to need to assemble them in one place physically so that I know what I have and to set the order that I’ll be reading them in.  So they are in fact perfectly positioned for me to manage through stacks.  So, then, why am I restoring the list?

When I talked about reading some books, like the Bible, I got a comment from Ester expressing interest in reading what I thought of them.  Of course, by the list it would take me months to get there, and so I wanted to express that in some way so that if someone wanted to know what I was reading and how long it might take me to get there they’d have some kind of reference.  And some of the books I’m reading are not exactly standard and so I thought again that some people might be interested in seeing what I was reading and going to read and commenting on that, or looking back to see when I might get around to commenting on that.

So I’ve restored the Reading List, breaking things down into three categories.  The first is the things I’m reading mostly for fun, which right now is my finally getting through a bunch of White Wolf novels that I had started once but never finished.  I don’t know what I’m going to read after that, although it’s likely to be the X-Wing books.  The second is the classic novels that I’m trying to read while doing laundry, which right now is a bunch of King Arthur books — including a re-read of “The Pendragon Cycle” because the first time I read it I noted that it made me want to re-read some of the more classic legends and I’m interested in seeing how I feel when I do things the other way around — followed by the complete Conan the Barbarian works and then finishing off Anna Karenina and Crime and Punishment, after which I’ll probably have to find some new ones to read (I’m thinking about trying “Ivanhoe” at some point, actually).  The third is the list of philosophy books that I’m trying to read while doing laundry, which right now is a bunch of theology/philosophy of religion things, including the Bible and Carrier’s mythicism books, and then finishing of the Nietzsche and some Sartre.

I also kept the old list (actually lists, since there was an old one there already) and will move completed sections below to keep the main list from getting too cluttered.  So if anyone wants to know what I’m reading, the Reading List is once again the place to go.