alfvaen | Apr. 26th, 2008

Sometimes I get these urges to be creative. To do something, to make something, to write something. Unfortunately,this almost always happens while I'm at work.

I'll be sitting there, staring at the computer screen, knowing I should be working on whatever coding/debugging project(s) I've been assigned, but all I feel is this creative urge. Which I pretty much always have to quash down or sublimate in some way, because, let's face it, that kind of creativity is not what I'm paid for.

This never really happens at home. Maybe that's because I actually have the freedom to satisfy the urge at home. Which I don't generally do by writing, no, because that's Hard Work and Not Fun. Instead I usually satisfy it by playing games, particularly "god games" like The Sims 2 or something. Or making lists of things. Or even tinkering with my solo Lorenai or Atlantis games.

One of these days I won't have to go to work all the time, and I wish that there was something I could with a decent chance of making that day come sooner. Time to buy a lottery ticket, I guess.

My reading habits have undergone another change in the last little while.

At some point when I was younger, I read everything in the order I bought it, pretty much. It took a while before I had enough of a backlog that I wasn't finished reading everything before I bought more books, but even by the time I went to University I had multiple boxes of unread books.

Then I got more complex, interspersing rereads and magazines, promoting certain choicer books into a "Priority" slot, etc. This got more intricate, until I decided to subdivide my books into different types--fantasy and SF series, authors Nicole had recommended to me, Canadian authors, etc. I would then read those types in a set order.

I bogged down on this eventually, because in the end I didn't want to read each type of book equally. Finally I just decided that I would have one of each type of book available to choose from, but I could choose freely from that shortlist which one I wanted to read next. And that was my system up until a little while ago.

First of all, I reread the Harry Potter series shortly before the seventh book came out. I reread them close together, but with one non-Rowling book between each one. Then, after Robert Jordan died, I decided to do the same with the Wheel of Time series. More recently, I had the urge to reread Lois McMaster Bujold's Vorkosigan series, in chronological rather than publication order as I had first read it.

You see, in the last few years I've found myself buying fewer and fewer new books, and those mostly from known authors. It may even be that I am actually starting to slowly catch up on my unread books. I used to care about that, someday thinking that I might catch up. Now it doesn't really concern me at all. With our recent attempts to weed out books that we don't think we'll ever reread, I've been thinking more about what books I would like to reread, and the list has been growing. On the other hand, a lot of previously unread books, especially lesser ones by authors I don't like as well or haven't read before that have been sitting on the shelves waiting to be read for ten or fifteen years now, tend to go right into the weeding pile after I read them.

So now I've made it official--every second book I read is probably going to be a reread, for the foreseeable future. I just reread Deathly Hallows again, I'm working on Tigana right now, and after that I'll probably to C.J. Cherryh's Chanur series. I'll be reliving my past, essentially, and I guess that doesn't bother me. I'm not as adventurous as I used to be, I suppose, and who cares? I still probably have read more books than 99% of my acquaintance, and I haven't come even close to reading a tiny fraction. I can't read everything, and I have more trouble finding new books that I like, so I'm to pull back for a while.