Starting to read again

I start this year with a considerable backlog of personal projects and deferred maintenance. Once settled back into my routine I hope to do better at making time for progress on my tasks outside paid employment. I will have more to say on the larger picture but this entry is about a recent promising change.

For much of my life I have read a lot but in recent years hardly at all. Last Saturday I borrowed a couple of science fiction novels from the library, Carey's The Boy on the Bridge and Lostetter's Noumenon and over the following couple of days read them both which is most heartening. I am minded to go back today and borrow a couple more. If I can get back to reading then maybe I can also get back to other activities.

In pencil somebody had briefly annotated the first book with critical comments on its writing: I was amused to find myself agreeing. I reflected on how greatly I value editors: while I write reasonably I am in no doubt that guidance from a half-decent editor would much improve my work. I like clever people providing useful help.

A couple of days ago I recalled a scene from a recent story and tried to remember what it was from; it turned out to be from that first book. The memory may have confused me because it was so visual: I suppose that I must have been imagining the story as I read it and I simply remembered what I had invented. I also have a good memory of a handgun from a dream this morning but I suspect that I appropriated its appearance from one of the movies I saw over the holidays.

Shopping mall: books and banking

Dundee's city center has a multi-level indoor mall at each end of the pedestrianized shopping area. One of those malls is the Wellgate Centre: three levels of stores with some vacant units then a couple more floors of car parking and the library from which I have now borrowed more science fiction: Sawyer's Calculating God and Watts' Echopraxia. The librarians are busy handling the intake of their books returned to other library branches over the holiday then transferred.

After British Home Stores collapsed the resulting department store vacancy at Wellgate was filled by T. J. Hughes who fit in well being a little more downmarket. Wellgate typically has at least an escalator or elevator out of service; the smaller Overgate Centre at the other end of the shopping area was greatly redeveloped and is correspondingly shinier.

Near the Wellgate Centre's main entrance is Dundee's remaining branch of the Bank of Scotland where I have my checking account, not to be confused with the Royal Bank of Scotland who have a branch just a little further down. In Boston I would typically deposit funds at the Belmont Center branch of Cambridge Savings: their automated machine would read amounts off checks and saved me the hassle of filling out a deposit slip then putting everything in an envelope. Since moving back to Britain I had not seen such machines until I switched from Clydesdale: the Bank of Scotland deposit machines are equally convenient, on the receipt printing cash counts by denomination along with images of any checks.