roadnotes brought to my attention The Challenge: A Month of Letters, where one writes a letter to someone every day the USPS delivers mail in February. Sounds like an excellent idea, and an excuse to reconnect with some people I've lost touch with. My first letter will be to a guy I worked with at the rickshaw place for a while who I grew rather fond of, who disappeared for a while and resurfaced in DC. I don't know if he'll want to keep up any correspondence, but I'm willing to take the chance.I actually read two whole books this month! Not getting the paper any more frees up commute time for book reading. Neither Liaquat Ahamed's Lords of Finance: The Bankers Who Broke the World (not set in this century!) nor Garry Wills's Bomb Power is an easy read (though Bomb Power reads quick, it's fairly short) or a feel-good sort of book, but they both give insight into how our world got that way. I also got a tidbit or two for the Freud-Rudolf novel along the way.
Speaking of which, I'm ready to return to research reading for that project. I'm torn between going back to the biography of Franz Joseph I began a few months back, possibly restarting from the beginning; reacquiring the library copy or purchasing a copy of the recent biography of Freud I started a few months back and couldn't finish in one library borrowing cycle; or continuing with the abridgement of the famous Jones biography of Freud, which is valuable because Jones knew Freud personally and because I want Freud to correspond with Jones in his customary fashion as a part of the book. I still wish I read faster, so this didn't seem like such a tough call.
(
agrumer just pointed me at this, which I note here to self as just the thing to send to someone I plan to write to.)Does anyone have a good system for keeping track of novel-related research stuff? My research skills are antiquated and not very tech savvy. Avi mentioned Tiddlywiki as a possibility, since I think linkage between timeline stuff might have some use, but it's iffy with Windows 7. And I'm sorry, Excel is for number crunching.