Thursday, October 26, 2006

Reading Material? Take a Number!

Seems like all of a sudden everyone wants to give me something to read! I just finished a really good fiction book (Rule of the Bone by Russell Banks) that I was two-timing with Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides, which I'm very much enjoying but am only about a third of the way through. I generally like to have two books on the go at a time, because it gives me the variety to put one down (for the moment) and pick the other up, whenever the spirit moves me. But part of what makes that work (for me) is having two very different books to choose from, because then I'm picking between them, at any given time, based on my mood. So when Tammy, with just the slightest trace of pout in her voice, complained that she'd read almost all of my favourite books whereas I never seem to read any of hers (I guess the first Harry Potter book doesn't count!) it seemed like I should stop being such a bad parent and see what she had to offer. Her favourite book (aside: Tammy's favourites change on a fairly frequent basis, no matter what type of favourites we're talking about) is One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez. So that's what she'd like me to read, or at least give a try. So now I have that, which I read the first couple pages of and thought looked interesting enough, except that it's very similar to Middlesex, meaning I'll be reading two very comparable books concurrently, which isn't exactly variety!

And then there's PeopleWare by DeMarco & Lister, which so many of my co-workers are gushing about (despite it being a 20-year-old book) and which now I've got a copy of on my desk at work (I'm about 30 pages in so far). And Danelle's got a book on leadership that she thinks I'd enjoy, so that's on its way.

Add in 2 weeks' worth of unread comics, the 2 - 5 Agile article links that get referenced every day at work, the various blogs I'm following, the raft of interesting websites I track, and I find myself with more reading in front of me than I know what to do with!

Not that that's such a bad problem to have...

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

You can put mine off for a while then, and work on finishing Middlesex. I can never handle more than one book at a time, I prefer to be focus. I can barely handle watching so many TV shows; I start to get them confused.

Kimota94 aka Matt aka AgileMan said...

Not to worry, daughter-mine! Rules are made to be (occasionally and carefully) broken, so I'm sure I can make this work.