victorien

I spent a little time today purposefully being "slow" - that is, I worked with my hands and put together a shelf to clear off some space on my desk; I cleaned some of the living room so it'd be less of a visual scream; I holed up at the kotatsu with the heat on my legs and phone out of reach and finished The Beginning Place by Le Guin. When I got bored earlier, I cleared off the piano bench and played for nearly an hour (the first practice session in over a year). There's a noticeable difference, and I feel calmer. My mind isn't running at full throttle, and time feels normal again.

That's a weird thing to have happen in the past few years: I always feel like I'm waiting for something. Temporally displaced and with unsure footing. Kind of like a low grade anxiety/anticipation of an event or a trip, except that there's nothing on the calendar. Leaning forward across the week instead of standing upright in the current day.

I ended up buying three new books yesterday on the way home from work. Paperback, instead of e-books, because lately every time I try to read something on my phone I end up getting distracted past the first page. At least a physical copy has one purpose only: it is a book, and it is to read.

I do kind of feel like a walking joke of "local book fan enjoys collecting books", with the insinuation they are never read; but they are, in a sense, self-care. Forcing myself to slow down, re-developing a tolerance against distraction. It really is hard, though. Carving out silence in such a loud world is such a monumental effort.

(Reductress needs to stop calling me out.)

Left to right:
The Anomaly by Hervé Le Tellier - This one is new to me, and I only know what the synopsis revealed on the back cover. A passenger plane disappears during a thunderstorm, and reappears twice, the second time months after the first. Every passenger on board is an identical copy of the person they were at the time of the incident. Of course, I can imagine the passengers who arrived first have an advantage over their "copies". How would you react to a separate instance of yourself, who had been yourself until a freak accident? How would you react, if you were considered the copy, and your life had been stolen, written over, by yourself?

I love stuff like this. I immediately thought of SOMA, and of "Learning to be Me" by Greg Egan. (The latter made such a mark on me. It dug its way into my soul and I still think of it occasionally.)

Neuromancer by William Gibson - The book that started the cyberpunk genre in the 80s. I recently finished watching Cyberpunk: Edgerunners with my partner, and for as much as I like the genre itself, I've never gotten around to reading the original. I'm bracing myself for "80s sci-fi written by a white man" tropes and stereotypes, but we'll see how it goes.

Quarantine by Greg Egan - Even with the synopsis, I'm still not sure what this is even about. I do love Greg Egan already, though, so I was less apprehensive about picking it up. Honestly, I'm amazed I actually found a few of his books in a physical store. The thing about Greg Egan, the thing I like so much, is that he's a hard science writer that focuses on existentialism interacting with the quantum level. Which, in practice, means a lot of fucked up science doing fucked up things, making you wonder what being human actually means. Apparently, in this one, the known galaxy (Milky Way) has been cut off from the rest of the universe, like it was enclosed in a giant ball. The stars "went out" as a result thirty years ago, and the skies have been dark since then.

I haven't read Greg Egan in a bit, but I know the attention span demand for his writing is higher than what I usually read. Lose focus and that's a whole page or two you have to reread.


I still haven't decided what order I'll read them in, but since The Anomaly seems shortest, I'm leaning towards that one.