Audiobook version of Ocean Vuong’s ‘On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous’. I listened to 10 minutes of the authors narration and just decided that at least for me, if I had to listen to a whole book of this person speaking I would puncture my own eardrums.

It was the kind of singsongy voice where even statements seem like questions/suggestions and/or feel like complaints. It remains the only audiobook I’ve ever returned and ‘never again’ is too short an interval for when I would want to engage with it again.

Shame, because it got so much hype and I was looking forward to it.

My parents approach seemed to work. We went to the library weekly and got however many books I wanted (usually more than I’d realistically finish in a week) and the deal was I had to read one book each week that was the librarian’s recommendation. We had great librarians. I got so much good stuff from them.

That morphed into my parents bookshelves always being accessible, though when I was younger the stuff I shouldn’t read was sorted to top shelves (naturally, this meant I dragged chairs over to reach the top shelves but such has always been the case with prohibited literature).

My parents simply normalizing that taking a book out of the bookshelf or off the coffee table it had been left on made it normal for me too. ‘Oh, dad got his book, sat down on the couch and is quietly reading? Dad’s pretty cool, maybe I should do that too. Where’s my book so I can read like Dad does?’

As an adult, I also find that just talking to kids (nieces/nephews for me) about what they like re: books in an inquisitive, non-judgemental way is helpful. I don’t really give two flying effs if they’re reading Percy Jackson, Harry Potter, the Chronicles of Narnia, or being the stupid 12yo overfaced by trying to read Moby Dick cause they love going to the aquarium. The magic of ingesting a story and then being able to recount it to others is pretty powerful. Then reading gives a kid something to say if someone is willing to ask. My nieces and nephews know I’ll always ask what the best thing they’ve read lately is, and for them to tell me about it. We’ll eat ice cream while we do it on a special outing, but they know their uncle asks about books so there’s always one in the hopper to talk about.

When they get old enough to have their own preferences I’ve loved the Barnes and Noble outing idea. Starbucks is there usually, so turn a kid loose (assuming they’re well behaved) in their age appropriate section and just let them be while you sip a latte and let them wander the aisles. Set a limit (‘you can pick only two’, but they can pick any two books they want) and suddenly they’re considering carefully exactly which two they want to bring home and the selection is valuable and ownable instead of foisted on them. Make books valuable and kids treasure them.

I’m one of those people that likes to point out how differences in writing style affect people’s enjoyment of the book, but I don’t intend that as an invitation to fight. You get it and jive with it, or you don’t and go read something else.

I’ve done the math on the books I own (in my own home, physically) as a 40 something year old dude. I own more unread books than I’ll ever be able to tackle (even if I never buy another book), want to buy more, and it’s highly unlikely people will just stop writing books for 40-60 years to let me catch up. I enjoy having them because I have my own personal library that I can afford to curate.

But it really drives the point home when you track all the books you want to read vs what you’re doing reading a book that isn’t clicking. My rule of thumb is if I’m interested enough to crack it open, I’ll do a third of the book or 200 pages, whatever’s shorter. Put a bookmark at the stopping point before you begin reading. When you get to the bookmark, it’s a ‘hell yes’ (keep reading) or just close the book and get something else off the shelf.

I get through ~50 books/year, a pace I’ve maintained since ~25 years old, which means life is very literally too short to waste on bad books. 2,750 max (assuming 80 year lifespan and a constant 50 books/yr between 25-80) are in the hopper and shocker - people keep writing. Read what you want!

If TBP doesn’t resonate with you, literally go read anything else that does. You don’t need permission to not like something a lot of other people do, nor should it bother you.

Big Rock Candy Mountain, Wallace Stegner. Our standards of living may have changed but how we live doesn’t.

Executive Orders, Tom Clancy. Predicting 9/11 and Ebola/Anthrax (more or less) as no trivial accomplishment and one could argue that 9/11 sent us spiraling to where we are now.