I have been rather lazy since returning from Wildwood and have not done any writing all week. Instead I have been spending my time taking an inventory of my book collection. I have 8 bookshelves–including sf magazines–and I have tallied slightly less than 3 of them so far and I am already over 1,000 books. When I finish I expect the tally to approach 3,000 books and sf magazines. The important question is: why do I save all those books? I have already culled several hundred of them from my collection, the ones I have no interest in ever rereading, so apparently the reason I keep them is my dream of someday rereading all of them. But even if I could increase my reading pace to one book/magazine per week, that would take me 60 years to reread every book, assuming I never buy another new book ever. Optimistic as I might be about my health in the future, it is highly unlikely I will both stop buying books totally and live for another 60 years.

My music collection is not nearly as extensive. I inventoried it previously and the total is slightly below 1,000 cds and tapes. I listen to music whenever I am working on the computer which, when I am not at school, approximates five hours per day. Assuming I retire at some point in the future, and assuming an average tape/cd is 60 minutes long, doing a little math (no sarcastic comments here ☺) tells me I can listen to 5 cds/tapes per day, requiring a total of 200 days to listen to my entire collection. That’s less than a year.

Keeping the above statistics in mind, it seems fitting to mention the following:

Currently listening: to my entire Beatles collection, starting with Meet the Beatles (the English version) and going through the two Past Masters. If you have not listened to the Beatles in many years (or decades), now is a good time to do so again. I think you will be surprised at how good their music actually was.

Currently reading: Larry Niven was one of the finest storytellers in sf from the mid-60s through the mid-80s, but in the years since he has mostly written collaborative novels with Jerry Pournelle, Steven Barnes and Brenda Clough. Flatlander is a collection of his sf mysteries about Gil “The Arm” Hamilton, good stories if you want a break from serious, character-driven fiction. And what-the-heck, a good mystery is fun occasionally.