I've been thinking quite a bit about how we discover and engage with media over the last few days (see my previous thoughts on this here), and it got me reflecting about my personal collection of books that is scattered, with varying degrees of intentionality, around my home. I'm pretty sure every room contains a small (or large) assortment of books in some corner, cabinet, shelf, or carefully stacked atop surfaces to catch the interest of someone sitting nearby. As I took some time to pay attention to these piles, I realized just how strange my book collection really has become.

There's the shelf in my bedroom that holds everything from fantasy series to Russian classics to short story anthologies to folklore. There's the pile on my subwoofer of deep dives into specific albums I like (including one on Celine Dion's Let's Talk About Love). There's a bookshelf in my living room with bird and animal studies, oral histories, essay collections, and bordering on what might be considered too many books on mushrooms and foraging. My office (which is only about the size of a large closet) contains all my so-called higher interest books (read: boring), ranging from history, theology, sociology, tech-criticism, economics, urbanism, design, and more. There's even a small collection of various editions/translations of The Hobbit sitting above my record player.

My tastes in books are wide and eccentric, and they have arrived here in all manner of ways. I have haphazardly picked up books from places I have visited and deliberately tracked down certain books because they piqued my interest at a certain time. Friends and family members have gifted me books they thought seemed like something I'd like. Other books hold sentimental value in some way (like a couple I was given from a professor who made an impact on me).

I guess what I'm trying to say is that I don't think an algorithm can ever really capture this sort of collecting. While it can distill all of this into suggestions for me to buy something else, it can never replicate the various motivations behind the acquiring of those books. It can't replace human thoughtfulness.

Took the summer off from my regular reading and instead enjoyed some fiction. Read a couple Tana French novels (this one & this one) and book one of the Malazan series.

Other than that, I've been spending a bunch of time with the kids.

Oh, I also wrote this.

Did a triple header of Irish folk horror this past weekend with Unwelcome (Fri), The Hallow (Sat), and Boys From County Hell (Sun).

Been consuming a bunch of Sinead O'Connor content over the last few days. She was such an absolutely remarkable spirit and it's tragic to see her gone. But I came across this interview with Alyson McCabe, who recently wrote a book about why Sinead O'Connor matters. It was a really good conversation but there was something that stood out to me. At one point McCabe said that Sinead O'Connor had almost no career self-preservation. Repeatedly she would let her ideals and her values override the conventional wisdom for celebrity success.

In an interview that O'Connor did in 2021, she herself said,

“I don’t define success by how much money you make. I define success, personally, by [asking myself] did I keep the contract I made when I made my holy communion and my confirmation? Which was to stay true to the very Christian beliefs that were drilled into me by the Catholic Church, which were the rejection of the material world in favour of truth. So I was just being me. I was just being a punk.”

As someone who has at times had a similar lack of career self-preservation because of my ideals, I resonated with all of this. I had a mentor who used to say, don't smoke your own supply. That is, don't buy into the hype of what people say about you -- good or bad. This seemed to be what Sinead O'Connor lived by. Do what seems right to you based on the values you try to live by, not aligning yourself to other people's expectations. That's not to say you shouldn't reflect on those values often, but let that be your measure of success; not status or money or whether or not people who don't even know you liked what you did.

Anyways, she was wonderful and I'm really trying to track down a copy of her Sean-Nós Nua album.