Greater than 1 second per second

My reading list is long. How long? Well, it is hard to say. If I froze it—i.e., never added anything until I had reached the end, I would be an old[er] man when I was done some time in the 2050s.

This sounds awfully concrete you may say, do you keep an actual list? Yes, in a way I do. There are a few separate lists I keep that roughly correspond to what I consider a reading list. First there is a Wishlist that I have with Amazon, then there is a 2read tag in my bookmarks and in Yojimbo that can be considered a reading list. A few other entries floats in my brain or are stashed away in other places. Together they are as good a master list as I'm going to get.

But if the list is so long that I will never reach the end, why keep it?

First of all, I'm not going to read all of it—and not for the obvious reason that I'm going to be dead by then. It is just that sometimes you put something on the list, then read something else that covers the same general area making that book or article  redundant. Or the item is just so old that science and knowledge has moved on. I don't prune the list ahead of time, nor do I always read it in sequence.

Second, the very act of reading is a curse worse than what befell Sisyphus. At least he knew what his calendar looked like for the next eternity or two. Push uphill; roll back; repeat. Yes, he was fully occupied for eternity, a thing that is both good (obviously great health benefits since he didn't die) and bad (no days off).

Mine calendar is: read next item; get inspired by current item to add a few more to the list; repeat. Clearly the end of the list never gets any closer, even though the pruning mentioned above sometimes makes me skip ahead.

We all time-travel at a speed of 1 second per second (1s/s). As the end of my list moves away from me at roughly 1 to 10 s/s (with considerable jerkiness) it is still not futile to keep the list as long as one is careful where to put new items, and where to grab the next item.

If I alway put new items at the end, and always read them in order, I probably would never get to anything I added these days, since the list is longer than my natural lifespan. Always putting new items at the front isn't much better.

The trick is to apply serendipity and selective randomness. (This is where I get preachy) Read what catches your eye or what you come across at the moment. Pick up a magazine in a waiting room and look for articles about subjects you know nothing about and see if you can figure out enough from context to understand something. Then when you want to read in depth, try to cluster the subjects; read a few articles about the same thing, or read books by authors who vehemently disagree with each other and see if you can dismiss one of them as false or if you have to hold both opinions as possibly correct for now.

Does an actual reading list help with this? Oh yes. If you don't write down what you think you might like to read later, you either end up buying the book now (bad choice unless you are very rich and have a very large house) or you forget that you thought you might want to read it later and miss out on a great experience. (Ok, done preaching.)

Latest item on the list? Funny you should ask.

Hale, Christopher (2003). Himmler’s Crusade: The Nazi Expedition to Find the Origins of the Aryan Race. Hoboken, N. J.: John Wiley & Sons. pp. 200. ISBN 0-471-26292-7 [Kindle edition here.]