The struggle

I feel like my brain isn't making the connections I want to make as fast as I want it to, and I have trouble focusing my attention on things other than distractions. There are at least 20? 30? (I am fibbing, it is a lot more than that) books that I have started within the past couple of years that I have not completed: some where I am just a few pages in, some of them where I am near the end. My to-read pile is well over a year long at this point at a decent pace (yes, I need to stop buying more books). I just feel like there is so much that I have missed, or not had exposure to, or things that I read when my brain wasn't the same as it is now that deserve to be re-read and re-processed.

A wrinkle in the re-read effort is the fact that I let go of almost all of the books that I read in college over the years; some of them immediately after the quarters were over and others during various purges. There are a few texts that can't be replaced easily, but what I really regret letting go of are the syllabi from the classes that I took. I remember most of the books and stories from the classes that made the deepest impression but everything else is kind of a haze. Maybe there is a reason that I have forgotten some of them, but I still wish that I had curated things a little more carefully.

There has been outside pressure and the weight of accumulation that have spurred past efforts at de-cluttering, but there are certain connections that are hard to maintain without having something to refer back to. Whether it was a book that triggered a memory or a note that I had written about something I wanted to hold on to I have let go of a lot of my external memory storage, and unsurprisingly and I have found that my internal memory is not to be entirely trusted. So I will have to start over a bit, and hopefully this space will help me hang on to a few things so I don't end up accidentally discovering and downloading the exact same PDF twice within the space of a month.