LIFO Reading?

AJ at Staggering Implications is a long term fellow traveller in our individual epistemic quests – he’s been prolific in posting new thoughts in recent months, so many that I’m noticing but not doing justice to reading. Despite appearances, that’s partly because I’m actively avoiding reading until I’ve progressed my own literary efforts beyond the blog and social media.

“That’s LIFO” is one of his recent posts that resonated. Unlike him, I have an explicit book reading list – linked top right – but it was getting so long I’ve not been adding many these days. It’s a store of future reading, beyond the efforts above. What I am doing, as he suggests, if I spot an “interesting” book, is effectively adding it and crossing it off in one fell swoop – Last In First Out. That was the case with my most recent read and review “The Brie Chronicles”. And it looks like being the case with this recommendation below from Anil Seth:

“What reader in their right mind would buy a novel called New Finish Grammar?”

Well here’s why:

“A wounded sailor is found on a Trieste quay -amnesiac, unable to speak and with nothing to identify him except a name tag pointing to Finnish origins.”

Sounds suspiciously like one of the potential premises for my own efforts- as a modern day sequel to a sequel (to a sequel) to Moby Dick. Biggest challenge being a real-time narrative to a multi-generational first-person view. Something’s gotta give. Maybe I’ll find a clue – amnesia replaced with the older memories of others?

Copy ordered and on its way.

(Quite a few additions to the book list – I buy a cheaper Kindle copy for later reading or search-based research – but with actual novel / narrative literature I still prefer a physical book, often used / second-hand. I should add, the British Library looks like it’s open for business at last after its major denial of service outage – so the more expensive “text-book” titles might be better brought to their Yorkshire reading room. Sadly it’s not a lending library, and the public lending libraries in the UK seem to have lousy access to anything not on best-seller lists these days.)

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