I hope to reduce my in-progress list

I don't make New Year's resolutions, but this year I have some things I want to do and some things I want not to do. The last vow I made was to make no more vows. So these are "decisions" or "goals" I suppose. I'm not going to list them here. But one of them follows on my last blog entry. I have decided to finish a book before starting or switching to another book. That way I hope to reduce my in-progress list down to a very small number from the ridiculous size it is right now.

Last night I finished Joseph Heller's Catch-22. It was much longer than I thought it would be. Reading on an e-reader obscures a book's true length, which can be both good and bad. Some books' massiveness can be daunting, so it's psychologically easier to read the e-version, and it's also physically easier: a 1000-page tome is big and bulky! Catch-22 isn't that big, but it's substantial at around 500 pages. And it's a doozy of an absurdist early postmodern character-driven crazy-quilt masterpiece, perhaps the first novel to capture the ridiculous double-binds and arbitrary tragi-comedies of life during wartime (WW2 in this case) for American soldiers. I'm glad I read it and I'm chagrined it took me this long to do it.

Now I'm reading Jonathan Lethem's Motherless Brooklyn, a Solstice e-gift from a friend, and I am thoroughly enjoying the author's gift for creating lifelike characters and entertaining situations, as well as his witty and poetic way with words. I'm so happy to encounter Lethem, who's been publishing novels since the mid 90's—way off my radar until I read his 2017 collection of essays, More Alive and Less Lonely: On Books and Writers.

I'm continuing to enjoy my Freewrite devices—writing this on the Smart Typewriter. Job descriptions, or division of labor, if you will: Alpha for daily journal writing, often several times a day; Traveler for quiet writing (I envision it for coffee house writing); Smart Typewriter for working on my nonsense novel or when I want a premium clicky typing experience with a front-lit e-ink screen. They are all getting used.