If you frequent my blog, you know how much I like a good short story. I’ve been making it a point to mix-in short stories between my longer fictional reads.

I recently enjoyed Amazon’s Forward Collection of six short science fiction stories, so I was eager to read one of the latest additions to Amazon’s Original Stories, Young Blood by Andrew Barrer.

Whether you get your news from the internet, television, newspaper, radio, or any other media outlet, it can be downright depressing. Headlines abound of natural disasters, terrorism, war, territorial disputes, violent crimes, and, these days, continuous coverage of the pandemic. It’s enough to make you think we live in the darkest of times.

This constant negative news cycle led me to read Factfulness by Hans Rosling last year. If you haven’t read it, I highly recommend it. It’s one of my Must Reads and at the top of my books to read in 2020. The book puts the news cycle into its proper perspective and makes you realize that we actually live in the best times ever known to humanity.

I’ve made this opinion known to many people, and in one of those discussions, a friend told me that I had to read Enlightment Now by Steven Pinker. Since I like to get input and insight from different sources on a subject, and since this was a very good friend and trusted source, I made it a point to put the book near the top of my reading list for this year.

Humanity has a seemingly endless fascination with exploration. It’s as if it’s built into our DNA, which it probably is. People have been fascinated with exploring new lands for millennia with expeditions to the New World, Antarctica, and Moon being some of the more recent. Aurora, by Kim Stanley Robinson, is written based on this tradition.

The first, and only, William Gibson novel I’ve read is Neuromancer. It’s been nearly five years since I read it. I don’t remember a lot of details about the book. What I do remember is that I liked it a lot, and I was impressed by the amount of technology foreshadowing in the novel. The immersive cyberspace environment and human augmentation concepts that he wrote about back in 1984 were way ahead of their time. Those seemingly far-fetched concepts are close to becoming a reality today, if not here already.

Ever since finishing Neuromancer, I’ve wanted to read more of Gibson’s works. It’s taken a while for some reason or another, but I finally got around to it. So, for my second venture into Gibson’s extensive library, I choose to read the follow-up to Neuromancer, Count Zero.

One of my goals for this year is to be more present, to live in the moment. It’s a recurring theme in my meditation practices, and, as I recently wrote about, one I consistently struggle with. I have a tendency to get wrapped up in my thoughts, whether it’s about the past, the future, or my latest work project. These distractions can keep me from being fully present and engaged in the now.

So what do when I’m struggling with something? I research and read about it.

Therefore, I decided to read 10-Minute Mindfulness: 71 Simple Habits for Living in the Present Moment by S.J. Scott and Barrie Davenport. I figured that I would find at least a few of their recommendations useful on my journey to living more mindfully.