A Cartographer of Tiny Perfect Things
Curation is what I do.
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I grew up in a house full of books. My father is a voracious reader, and he gravitated toward action-adventure and sports (he has some very early editions of Ian Fleming Bond books). He also has an extensive silver age DC comics collection I tore through when I was young. I remember begging him to go up in the attic where they were kept so I could grab a new handful.
Consequently, I became a reader myself. This is an aspect of myself that is constantly changing. As they say, the only thing constant is change. I consistently was reading books, magazines, or comics since I could remember. Today, my reading has evolved because my interaction with words now has so many levels it is sometimes difficult to parse.
When I was growing up, things were simple: my house was full of books. I loved going to bookstores. I would literally get books for Christmas and birthdays and be incredibly happy. We would go on vacations, and I would bring more than one book to read. Those days, I probably read more silly Star Trek novels and a few science fiction classics.
At some point in this post-high-speed internet world, I stopped reading books as much as I used to do. I discovered blogs and Blogger. I read so much on the internet, and I wrote a lot of blog posts that actually buying a book and reading it became much less of a thing I did.
My attention shifting to online reading and writing was a blessing and a curse. I loved having the immediacy of blogs, and I could read a diverse group, but it also stunted my ability to read long-form.
This shift in my habits all happened post-college for me. I could read my college assignments and read for pleasure at the same time easily. I reread the Foundation series and Dune during college and read a bunch of Shakespeare and Whitman. In graduate school, I had to do more research writing and pulled from all sorts of new sources. I used not only books and textbooks but long-form articles and academic writing. I never considered it out of the ordinary to have a non-academic book with me all the time and still concentrate on my school reading.
