Resetting my brain with books
For the past few years, I’ve felt like my brain has been fried by social media, specifically Twitter. My attention span seems to have diminished to whatever can be absorbed in bite-sized chunks; at best, I can read a longer newspaper article—i.e., the longest bit of text one might reasonably expect to find while scrolling through one’s feed. Maybe it’s just a side effect of aging, or maybe there’s another cause, but my intuition is that my social media consumption habits are to blame.
Lately I’ve been trying to reverse the slide in two ways.
- Write in this blog.
- Read longer works, with the ultimate goal of finishing each one even if the challenge level is… not so high.
In pursuit of the latter, I’ve just finished First and Only, the first novel in Dan Abnett’s series of Warhammer 40k novels, Gaunt’s Ghosts.
One of the covers for Dan Abnett’s First and Only. Fair play: this cover does not elide in any way what you’re getting into with this book.
I won’t get into the details of the Warhammer 40k universe, but the book is about a never-say-die regiment of sci-fi soldiers who defeat the odds against both unholy legions of cultists and corrupted officers in their own army. Human wave attacks are involved. Evil armies cover the walls of their bases in sigils of Chaos whose mere appearance will cause your eyes to water and your nose to bleed. It’s very dumb, the sci-fi equivalent of the kind of airport lit with operators taking out terrorists to save America, but nonetheless easy and entertaining to read. It turns out rehabbing your brain can be kind of fun. Onward to the second book, Ghostmaker!