All Songs Considered, Reading,

Sounds

I've been listening to the All Songs Considered podcast on iTunes for the last few months. They always release their weekly show on Monday night. The last few weeks, though, they've made some additions to their programming. One addition which I love is "Listening Party". They've released two of these so far.

Basically, it's an unreleased album streamed in low quality. Today I got to listen to Animal Collective's new album, Merriweather Post Pavilion, which is reference to a venue near Baltimore. I'm totally in love with the rhythms in this record. Although there's no typical screaming and shouting you hear on previous albums (e.g. Sung Tongs, Here Comes the Indian), Avey Tare's vocals are still driving with rhythmic and sometimes incomprehensible lyrical meanderings.

Another All Songs Considered product that they just started recently is a chat with a band or artist. Again, they got on the phone with some members of Animal Collective and got a lot of the fuzzy details that make the band so great cleared up. Does that make them less than great? Possibly to some, but not to me. Descriptive words like "horror" and "trance-y" kept coming up when Avey and the Geologist were talking about how they get things done. There was also the descriptive "water" element which they wanted to focus on when producing their new record. You can see and hear this on the cover and music, and in their new video for My Girls.

All around, this is an evolution of what Animal Collective has been moving towards since Sung Tongs, and naturally will become part of my physical music collection. I want my kids to discover this when they're going through my record collection.

Opinions

Early on my Google Reader this morning, I came across an article on the Guardian about reading. It basically said that if you read one novel a month plus an extra per year (they suggest over summer holiday) from the ages of 8 to 85, you will read 1000 books. With that knowledge, how can you decide which ones to read? I know for a fact that I have not read 13 books a year on average since I was 8. That would be 261 up to this point in my life. As you can see from my Goodreads account, I've read 71 books that I can remember. These are most of the books on my shelves. I have read cover to cover all of those that I claim, and probably 30 more technical books in college, plus probably up to 20 novels in high school and college for required reading. That's 121 since 9th grade. I couldn't even remember what I read before then, but let's say it's on the same trend. That's 173 books since I was 8. I'm 87 books off of my mark already, which is a few years behind. Even if I live to be 85, I doubt I will ever reach 1,000 books.

How do you know which to read? What are you most interested in now? I looked through some of the books the Guardian recommends, and there are more than a few I haven't heard of. I'm not really into fiction, but the more I read, the more I want to incorporate into my "books to read" list on Goodreads and in my life. I can handle multiple books at a time, but I usually concentrate on one, and leave the others in the background for rainy days, or when I'm sick of reading the main one.

I find books using Amazon, my network of friends, book reviews and trolling bookstores. Most of the time, I'll find a topic I become totally fascinated with and find the highest rated books on the subject, and binge them. That's basically what the Guardian is asking you to do for 77 years of your life. Binge on novels. They guarantee you will be very interesting by the end. I say that you will be a better reader by the end.

I'm not worried about finishing my 1,000 books before I die, because I'm getting better at it. But, the signs of "reader's block" have started. Creativity isn't just a requirement for the writer.

Programming

I have no great insight for this post. However, I've been writing a lot of Android apps, helping people write iPhone apps, and setting up a server with DNS and MySQL table replication. I have no goals or plan for this knowledge as most if it is necessary, therefore the insight is not revealing. Once I have some tidbits I'd like to share, they will be posted here.