User Profile

Jayp

jayp@bookwyrm.social

Joined 2 years, 5 months ago

I love to read but many of the books I 'read' these days are audio books because of how much I travel for work. My reading habits are a bit chaotic, and it seems I either binge a book in a couple weeks or take years of stopping and starting. However, since I started tracking my reading 5 years ago I've gotten much better at not leaving books on the back burner. I love to learn about and read history, science fiction, biographies, essays, politics, philosophy, popular science, and more. Recently I've become interested in reading classics too.

I consider the day a book is acquired to be when I start reading it. This is mostly for motivational purposes, otherwise I will get distracted by new books. I will likely move away from this system in 2025.

I love the concept of Bookyrm, and after tracking my reading in spreadsheets for the past 5 years I have now moved it all to Bookwyrm.

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Jayp's books

Currently Reading

2025 Reading Goal

45% complete! Jayp has read 9 of 20 books.

Kurt Vonnegut: Breakfast of Champions (1999, Dell)

Breakfast Of Champions is vintage Vonnegut. One of his favorite characters, aging writer Kilgore Trout, …

Vonnegut saw us for what we are

Listen, here is what I got out of Breakfast of Champions.

Every person has their own story. The nicest people you know could be ugly and hateful on the inside. We destroy not only what we love most, but also what we should actually love the most. We are all scared and damaged people who turn to self-destruction to cope with the horrors of the every day and the knowledge of our ever approaching mortality. If we were aware that this is what we were doing then it would horrify us. So we either ignore it and choose the bliss of ignorance, or we nihilistically and cynically accept the status quo, and so on.

Does Vonnegut have an answer to all that? I don't know, but I enjoyed Breakfast of Champions, and I'm doubly glad I read it now in these dark times.

reviewed Gravity's Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon

Thomas Pynchon: Gravity's Rainbow (Paperback, 1974, Bantam Books)

Tyrone Slothrop, a GI in London in 1944, has a big problem. Whenever he gets …

I don't know what rating to give

Gravity's Rainbow is like nothing I've ever read. While still less than one hundred pages in, it was clear that it is a brilliantly written book, had an interesting plot, and could be very funny. But what the hell is going on? Hard to say because just following along became close to impossible. I found some advice online that got me through the rest of the book, which was basically just to keep reading and ride along instead of trying to follow along.

And what a ride it was (Ja Ja!).

For maybe no reason at all, one quote at the end seemed worth making note of: 'Is there a fate that only I have been kept blind to?'

If you want to be challenged by a book, read Gravity's Rainbow. You might even enjoy it.