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….
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.
