My word. It’s November and this is the first post I’ve made since…May. Shame on me.

It’s not that I haven’t read anything worthy of comment. On the contrary, I see several titles on my read list I had ever intention of reviewing here, but…

It has been an unpleasant year. The deaths have mounted. Friends.

In June, Harlan Ellison passed away. I’m told he died in his sleep, a remarkably peaceful exit for such an iconoclastic, enormous personality. I’ve met few others for whom it can be said that he made every second count. That he considered me a friend still humbles me.

Before Harlan, Vic Milan died. He was one of the first professional SF writers I ever met. We were roughly the same age.

Then in the last month or so two friends outside the field died. Both were younger than me.

I have no larger point here other than to say that attention to other things has been difficult to maintain. This blog, these reviews, originally began as a personal amusement and a significant amount of time this year has been swallowed up in not being amused.

We were invited to attend Harlan’s memorial in September. It was an expensive trip, not only because we had a bit over a week’s notice, but there was no way to not go. We had been to Los Angeles only once before, to our first world SF convention in 1984. This time we were going to be in the heart of Beverly Hills.

We spent four days in L.A., met with Susan and close friends that Friday evening at Mel’s Diner, and attended the memorial at the Writers Guild West Theater Saturday evening.

I’ve already written about Harlan and the unexpected friendship. I won’t add to it here except to mention the warmth of those attending.

It takes it out of you after a while. There’s a childhood conviction that heroes should not die. That the very stuff of being a hero includes immortality. The adult knows better but the 8-year-old bristles with injustice.

I’ve managed to begin writing short fiction again. That was more difficult—and remains hard—than I expected. It requires time and attention, both of which seem less available.

And then there are the books that need reading.

I read Jo Walton’s new An Informal History of the Hugo Awards and came away delighted, amazed, and a bit intimidated. At several points, she mentions how often she rereads. Some books she rereads annually.

I can name the novels I’ve reread easily because they number so few. I read slowly. In high school I became a speed reader. At one point I estimated I was reading close to 3000 words a minutes, which would be somewhere around seven or eight pages. I tore my way through the Classics that way at the public library and read scores of SF novels.

Most of which I have forgotten.  After a dozen years my retention crumbled. I intentionally slowed down. I read pretty much at a snail’s pace now, which meansd it might take a week or more to get through a decent-sized novel.

But even when I could read at a heady clip, I rarely reread. There were too many new books to get through.

I’ve missed the boat on that. The last few years I’ve been hosting a reading group and I’ve had to reread some of the novels and it has been an unexpected revelation. I still don’t know when I’ll ever have time to seriously tackle a thorough reread, but I hope to.

On the plus-side, I have on my desk James Mustich’s magesterial 1,000 Books To Read Before You Die.  It’s an impressive catalogue. I did a quick tally and it turns out I’ve read roughly a quarter of them already. If I add in books by the same authors as those mentioned, it edges up toward 300. To be fair to myself, there are at least 300 books listed that I have never heard of.

There’s no time. And often we lack the requisite attention. We must cherish those times when the two coincide. I have been fortunate in my associations and my encounters. People, books, music. It is a trap to bemoan what you can’t get to when there are things you can and have. I look around at my office at rows of books I have read bits of or never opened. There’s a sense of wealth, in a way, to owning books. There is a greater wealth in knowing people.

Some of them have left the scene. It doesn’t seem that long ago that they were such vibrant, striking impacts on the intellect. In the case of writers, they linger. You can know them again, even if they’re gone.  We can’t know everyone. We should perhaps be careful choosing friends, but I think too often we have no choice. Friendship happens, it’s not a conscious decision. Had we set out to meet and befriend those who became most important to us, likely we would have failed.

Or not. Some people are simply that open.

I’ve reached a point, though, where I have to make such choices, because I am, through the loss of friends, aware in ways I never was before how little time there is.

I’ll try to be a bit more attentive to this blog, though, because I think it is important to note the impacts of friends and words.

Read deeply. A good book always offers more than what is on the page.