A Note on the Title and Layout

The title of this web log comes from a short story I wrote, A Slave to Simple Pleasures, which can be found here. It is about a man who allows himself to be pulled along by small, tangible pleasures, without anything in the way of goals or plans or striving for something better. It is very short.

I have been toying with an idea about reading in canon. Canon meaning "a contrapuntal musical composition in which each successively entering voice presents the initial theme usually transformed in a strictly consistent way." The process is as follows:

1. Read a unit of a book or novel, here defined as 100 pages.
2. Read a unit of another book or novel, then read a unit of the first novel.
3. The pattern of progression being 1st, 2nd, 1st, 2nd, 3rd, 1st, 2nd, 3rd, 4th, 1st, 2nd... with a new novel being added each rotation.
4. Once a novel has been finished, return directly to the first novel in the rotation. If you have finished the first novel, proceed to the second as planned.
5. If a novel has less than 10 pages after the last unit mark, read to the end.
6. If a novel has more than 10 pages after the 100, treat that portion as the last unit.
7. No more than 10 novels in rotation at a time.
   

The 4th and 7th rules are designed to avoid reading an avalanche of books at one time, and losing the thread on all of the stories. Once a book has been read, I will include a picture of the book, and a description of the reading experience. I will follow that with a snapshot of everything that I am reading at the moment, where I am in the book, and the like.

All of this is to avoid becoming the man in the story, to avoid the death of growth, the death of the soul. Reading has always done that for me.

I hope you enjoy.