Skip to main content

Read!

 


When I was in school, I think I liked the idea of reading, more than actual reading. There were a number of books I read because I wanted to impress myself that I had read them. I read Frankenstein, Catch-22, The Lord of the Rings, and others. I am not a fast reader. I can’t zip through a book like some people, but I tried to with these books. The result was that I did not get much out of them (other than the naughty bits in Catch-22). I checked them off my list, impressed with myself. But what were they about?

It wasn’t until I went to college and met my friend Vern, who instilled in me a love for reading, that my attitude changed. He introduced me to authors I had never read: Ursula K. LeGuin, Robert Heinlein, Walter M. Miller, James P. Hogan, and John Varley. His enthusiasm was infectious, and I found myself reading and actually enjoying the books. These books led me to new authors in the science fiction and fantasy realm.  Eventually I reread some of those earlier books and finding the depth of meaning between their covers. The world grew richer. I had a conversation with a woman once who said she never read books because they were too boring. She watched TV and movies. I thought, how sad. I have almost never seen a movie that grasped the richness and the feeling that one got from reading the book that it came from.

As an adult, I read a variety of genres. Nonfiction: history, science, biographies. Fiction: science fiction, fantasy, mystery, classics. I have even learned not to shy away from big books. War and Peace, which despite its length and the challenge of the Russian names, is a great book which I recommend. Read it for entertainment. Read it for elucidation. Don’t read it for prestige, because frankly, no one gives a crap if you’ve read War and Peace.  Read what works for you. I have read award-winning, highly regarded books that I loved, but also some of those were not so good. Just because critics liked it does not mean I will like it. To each their own.

But I think it is good for everyone to read, whatever they want to read. Even the silliest brain-candy of a book can expand your horizons. Reading can give you knowledge, but I think you can gain emotional knowledge too. It is good for the humanness of you. On the darker side, books have been used for nefarious purposes, to spread disinformation and propaganda. Books have also been political pawns, finding themselves banned in repressive regimes. I am not going to tell anybody what they should or shouldn’t read. I am just telling you to read.

Star Liner

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Roy Batty Figures it out

  This is written with the assumption that the reader has seen the film Blade Runner . If you haven’t, you may not get much out of it. In one of the last scenes in Blade Runner , the killer android Roy Batty, who holds Deckard’s life in his hands, has a remarkable speech: “I've seen things... seen things you people wouldn't believe. Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhäuser Gate. All those moments... will be lost in time like tears in the rain. Time to die.” I am told that the speech that was written was not working very well, and Rutger Hauer was told to just improvise something. Wow. He nailed it. At this point in the film Roy Batty has been the villain throughout. We have been rooting for Deckard (Harrison Ford) to take him out, but it is not going well, and it seems like Batty is about to kill him. At the last second, Roy Batty pulls Deckard up, to keep him from falling to his death. Then he delivers this...
Post a Comment
Read more

The Outsider

  I am reading The Outsider by Stephen King. The first 150 pages or so I found disturbing. Not for the reason you might think. It is not scary, not creepy in a traditional horror way, but disturbing in a tragic way. The first hundred to 150 pages is tragedy on top of tragedy. The most disturbing thing to me (it is disturbing to me anytime I encounter it in any story) is a false accusation. A man is falsely accused and may well be convicted of a horrific crime. That kind of thing disturbs my soul. It makes the whole world seem wrong. I have always been disturbed by stories with that kind of thing. And why not? It happens in real life too. That makes it all the more horrific. In the Jim Crow South, all you had to do was make an accusation against a black man to set the lynch mob in action. No need to bother with a trial. But even if there was a trial, the outcome was a foregone conclusion, innocent or not. We see Vladimir Putin inventing charges against people and they get locked up...
1 comment
Read more

A Child of the . . .

  What was it like to grow up as a child in the 90s? How about the 1940’s? Thinking about a child growing up in each different decade, conjures up images in my mind. But that is all they are: images. I was a child in the 1960’s. I can tell you what it felt like to be growing up in the 60’s and 70’s, but what it felt like to me is not what the history books remember. History will tell you the 60’s was about the Viet Nam War, civil rights, and the space race. The 70’s was Disco and Watergate. I remember being aware of all of those things, but to me this era was about finding time to play with my friends, something I probably share with a child of any decade. It was about navigating the social intricacies of school.   It was about the Beatles, Three Dog Night, The Moody Blues, The Animals, Jefferson Airplane. It was Bullwinkle, the Wonderful World of Color, and Ed Sullivan. There are things that a kid pays attention to that the grown-ups don’t. Then there are things the adults ...
Post a Comment
Read more