2001-04-20 - 11:59 p.m.

Library Of Dreams

Today I was looking for something to read - I wanted to go lie down in the bedroom and was searching for something to amuse myself while I was there. I'm in the middle of reading Stephen King's It, but I was looking for something non-fiction.

Scanning the shelves, my eyes fell on a book "Writing With Power" by Peter Elbow. Yeah I know, great last name.

I plucked it from the shelf because I was looking for something to help me with my writing technique. I'm still not happy with the way most of the essays here are turning out. There are a multitude of problems: my syntax is stilted, I keep forgetting points I wanted to make, and the writing is so just damn hard. There must be an easier way to get thoughts out of my head and onto paper - or whatever the hell this is.

So, I'm going to try to read "Writing With Power" and try to follow some of its advice. If I suddenly start to sound like Ernest Hemmingway or Kurt Vonnegut you'll know that it's working. Heh.

When I opened up the book, I noticed that there was a piece of paper between a couple of the pages - it was the receipt from when I bought the book. The date on it: Nov. 30, 1997.

I remember buying the book, too. I was at the local Borders and they have a bunch of remainder bins outside the store I call the "steal me please" bins. The book had a price that less than half its cover price, so I figured what the heck. Of course it was long before there was an "Uberhamster," or even the idea of it but I was still trying to find a voice.

So basically this book has been gathering dust in my library for over three years. It's been one of those hundreds of things that I'm "going to get around to someday." In fact my library is full of books like that. Diet books, self-help books, philosophy books, chess books, tarot books and so on. It's kind of a cross-section of my interests over the years.

Of course, this brings up an awkward question: how many of these books have I actually read? It's a hard question to answer. Maybe half, I'm thinking. However, some of the books aren't meant to be read. Many of the chess books are reference works, only meant to be consulted when questions about specific openings or positions arise. Nearly all the chess books have been consulted at one time or another.

But a good many of the books on the other subjects have perhaps been glanced at, but not read. For instance, once upon I time I was working on a book about the tarot. I didn't get too far on the project, but I bought a lot of books on the subject. In fact, even after it was pretty obvious that I wasn't going to be writing a book about the tarot I still kept buying other books as research materials. It was like I was unwilling to let go of the idea, of the dream.

And that's another fallacy I have - I think that just by spending money on the "dream" I'm actually making progress on it. I don't want to tell you how many diet books I still have. Too bad merely buying diet books only makes your wallet lighter.

I think, little by little, I'm going to take a look at the books in my library and see if some of them are dreams I still want to pursue now. It's going to take a while to get to them all, but I better get to it.

When I first moved in, I was so proud that all my books finally fit on my shelves. Now all the shelves are crammed full every which way. Not only that, but there are dozens of boxes of books from my parents' house. They had hardcover versions of all the classics: Twain, Dickens, Shaw and so on. I'd like to get around to reading them someday too.

And there's another little hitch in this ambitious reading project: in order to do it I'm going to have to get up from in front of the computer. Oh, drat.