Fictitious vol. 17: 3000 things to read

Ray Bradbury challenge, Armenian ballet, and some dictionary shennanigans

Hello! Happy to have you here, no matter if you’re a veteran reader or a recent subscriber. In this issue, I’m talking about a reading challenge I’m taking, introducing a little piece I wrote about music that fuels my work, and sharing some stuff about language.

I’d like to hear from you, dear reader, even if we don’t know each other yet. How are you doing? Drop a comment below and we’ll take it from there.

You can also buy me a coffee☕! All proceeds will go towards buying books and other content I’ll be reviewing for Fictitious.

The Ray Bradbury challenge

Reading Frank Theodat's newsletter the other week I stumbled upon something called the Ray Bradbury challenge. I don’t think the maestro ever envisioned it as such, but he did say the following in a speech:

What you’ve got to do from this night forward is stuff your head with more different things from various fields . . . I’ll give you a program to follow every night, very simple program. For the next thousand nights, before you go to bed every night, read one short story. That’ll take you ten minutes, 15 minutes.

Okay, then read one poem a night from the vast history of poetry. Stay away from most modern poems. It’s crap. It’s not poetry! It’s not poetry. Now if you want to kid yourself and write lines that look like poems, go ahead and do it, but you’ll go nowhere. Read the great poets, go back and read Shakespeare, read Alexander Pope, read Robert Frost.

But one poem a night, one short story a night, one essay a night, for the next 1,000 nights. From various fields: archaeology, zoology, biology, all the great philosophers of time, comparing them. Read the essays of Aldous Huxley, read Lauren Eisley, great anthropologist. . . I want you to read essays in every field. On politics, analyzing literature, pick your own.

But that means that every night then, before you go to bed, you’re stuffing your head with one poem, one short story, one essay—at the end of a thousand nights, Jesus God, you’ll be full of stuff, won’t you?

Ray Bradbury - from “Telling the Truth,” the keynote address of The Sixth Annual Writer’s Symposium by the Sea, sponsored by Point Loma Nazarene University, 2001

After considering the whole ordeal for 5 minutes, I decided to heed Ray Bradbury’s advice and challenge myself. 1000 days, one short story, one poem, one essay a day. So, 3000 things to read. 

“But Oleg, don't you hate reading challenges? I thought you loved to dunk on people who posted pics with fat stacks of books.” 

True but let me explain. 

I don't have anything against challenges. Ice bucket, cinnamon, planking - whatever rocks your boat and feeds the zeitgeist. I do, however, dislike it when people treat reading as a challenge. Mostly because I don't consider reading things like "How to sell like a superstar" and "Atomic Habits" to be challenging or worthwhile. And as the people posing with stacks of books come January (I once saw a pic of a guy doing the splits - Van Damme style - on two stacks of business books) rarely have difficult titles on their lists, I feel good about snarking and dunking. But that's just my personality, people.

As for the Bradbury challenge, I think it's intrinsically different. It's not instagrammable. It's not something you'd drop in a conversation trying to impress someone. On the contrary, it's personal and reflective (not as deep as studying the Talmud one page a day, but still). It's an excuse to spend more time exploring topics, discovering new writers and making connections, both between ideas and with other people. It also brings about the additional benefit of having less time to waste scrolling and lurking on social media.

Come to think of it, the initial idea behind Fictitious was quite similar. I thought I'd just read stuff and recommend stuff, but for better or worse, starting from probably the second newsletter, I started using this venue to share my own essays, rants, observations and even poetry and fiction. 

I want to keep going with all that. And I also want to document my Bradbury challenge. Documenting the stuff I'll be reading is not about creating a Second Brain. It's more about having one place to store the stuff I like (or disliked) and share it with the world. I don’t want to get toooo nerdy with it (like the guy who ate at 8000 Chinese restaurants), but this quest will probably include a Google Sheet or Notion page of some sort.

Every Wednesday, I'll be posting about the 7 stories, 7 essays and 7 poems read the week before. I’ll make sure that those who don’t want to receive these dispatches can opt-out, but I’ll promise that this part of Fictitious will be worth your while.

Some thoughts on Gayaneh

I had the opportunity to talk about my favourite piece of music to work to for Nikhil Rajagopalan’s newsletter. Gayaneh is 2-hour ballet (set in a bloody kolkhoz, as its Wikipedia page revealed) that has helped me push through many writer blocks. You can read the piece here:

A Guest Post by Oleg Volkov

The language corner

Word of the week. RUN. Is run the most complicated wod