books

Completionist

by matt on December 2, 2009

in books

In video game jargon, a “completionist” is a player who will continue playing a game until they have finished every level, found every secret, maximized their final score and have (essentially) consumed every single experience that a game has to offer.

Book Completionist
Last night, I was on Amazon looking for gifts for the coming holiday and I found that my purchase history back to 2004 was available. I started to look back to see what I purchased. It’s not a small number of books, so I copied them and then tried to remember which ones I read.

I’ve completed 34.0% of the books I purchased via Amazon in the last five years.

I’m not sure if that’s a good number, compared to all book buyers, but it’s much lower than I imagined it. I would have easily guessed I had completed 50% or more of the books…but no.

There’s a strong urge to go back and find all those unfinished books and get through them. In most cases, that would mean starting at the beginning because I can’t remember what I read in a book I bought and started in 2005.

I don’t know…if I started a book and put it down and forgot about it, is it worth picking back up? meh….

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Super-frog Saves Tokyo

by matt on June 1, 2009

in books

I’ve been on a Murakami kick. I just read after the quake his collection of short stories. I read after dark, too.

This passage from the short story “Super-frog Saves Tokyo” in the collection after the quake keeps coming back to me:

“That’s fine, Mr. Katagiri. It’s better that you don’t remember. The whole terrible fight occurred in the area of imagination. That is the precise location of our battlefield. It is there that we experience our victories and our defeats. Each and every one of us is a being of limited duration: all of us eventually go down to defeat. But as Ernest Hemingway saw so clearly, the ultimate value of our lives is decided not by how we win but by how we lose. You and I together, Mr. Katagiri, were able to prevent the annihilation of Tokyo. We saved a hundred and fifty thousand people from the jaws of death. No one realizes it, but that is what we accomplished.”

Frog says this to Mr. Katagiri. Katagiri doesn’t realize, yet, that Frog is mortally injured.

Reading it, I can’t be sure if the conversation is really happening or if it’s all in Katagiri’s head. Frog might be a representation of something inside Katagiri – an illness or a weakness.

Frog may represent something greater: our human struggle with things that are so large that they seem impossible to defeat…until we realize that the only way to defeat them is to act, no matter how insignificant we or our actions may seem in comparison.

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Voter’s Block

September 14, 2006

From Generation X by Douglas Coupland: Voter’s Block : the attempt, however futile, to register dissent with the current political system by simply not voting. (page 80) Technically, boycotting is not reasonable dissent when nothing is held back or deprived. Also, if I don’t vote (especially in Ohio, where the machines don’t work), nobody is [...]

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Terminal Wander Lust

September 13, 2006

From Generation X by Douglas Coupland: Terminal Wander Lust‚ A condition common to people of transient middle-class upbringings. Unable to feel rooted in any one environment, they move continually in the hopes of finding an idealized sense of community in the next location. (page 171) The reason this one caught my interest was the kernel [...]

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Power Mist

September 12, 2006

From Generation X by Douglas Coupland: Power Mist : the tendency of hierarchies in office environments to be diffuse and preclude crisp articulation. (page 25) I hate the Power Mist. The Power Mist is bureaucracy. Bureaucracy is a hydra. The Power Mist is one of the reasons why bureaucracies are evil. They have a unifying [...]

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Me-ism

September 11, 2006

From Generation X by Douglas Coupland: Me-Ism: a search by an individual, in the absence of training in traditional religious tenets, to formulate a personally tailored religion by himself. Most frequently a mishmash of reincarnation, personal dialogue with a nebulously defined god figure, naturalism, and karmic eye-for-eye attitudes. (page 126) Years ago, while an undergraduate [...]

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Homeowner Envy

September 8, 2006

From Generation X by Douglas Coupland: Homeowner Envy: Feelings of jealousy generated in the young and the disenfranchised when facing gruesome housing statistics. (page 144) I don’t think homeowner envy is just about houses or property. I think it’s broader, if the things my friends say is true. Consider a good friend of mine who [...]

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Emotional Ketchup Burst

September 7, 2006

From Generation X by Douglas Coupland: Emotional Ketchup Burst : the bottling up of opinions and emotions inside oneself so that they explosively burst forth all at once, shocking and confusing employers and friends‚ most of whom thought things were fine. (p21) Yep. I’ve done that. And I’m going to blame “Compromise” for it. Well, [...]

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