Tag: Books

My reading more books plan is off to a poor start. Though I’ve been able to streamline my otherwise time consuming activities, I haven’t yet gotten into the habit of picking up a book when I find downtime. Working on that.

Presently reading Walden…still. It’s a rather short book, but I had several stretches of days (weeks) where I didn’t pick it up, so I’m still working my way through it. One of the most striking things about this book is how much of its sentiments have worked their way into our contemporary culture. I was going to write ‘mainstream culture’ instead of ‘contemporary,’ but that’s probably not correct. I tend to have a poor grasp on what is common knowledge and what isn’t. But its ideas and sentiments are quite familiar to me, which is quite impressive for any work. Thoreau is a very witty writer, and I can see why he is quoted so often. It took me a few sections before I started highlighting passages and lines I found exceptional. At the same time, he can be incredibly pretentious (as he is with books) or dry (as he is with sounds).

I finished Blue Highways recently, and I’m not quite sure whether I liked it or not. It has many lovely stories about small towns all across America, which I loved to read about, but it’s also littered with little throw away facts about towns he drove through. It felt at times like the entire premise of the book was just an excuse to tell stories about small towns, but there’s a point of separation from the story when he just rattles off facts about a town without having stopped in it or talked to any residents. It feels like it would have been better as a collection of short stories, each with their own setting and characters instead of pulling them all into this larger narrative. I realize it’s all true, it’s just that I didn’t find his voyage all that interesting in and of itself.

Although I guess that shouldn’t be surprising, since the author/narrator didn’t really either. From the last page:

The circle almost complete, the truck ran the road like the old horse that knows the way. If the circle had come full turn, I hadn’t. I can’t say, over the miles, that I had learned what I had wanted to know because I hadn’t known what I wanted to know. But I did learn what I didn’t know I wanted to know.

I feel a similar way about the Tour, and often replied as such if anyone asked what I had learned. That’s also why I probably won’t ever write much about the trip, save a few events. There was a more revealing passage, several pages earlier, that had also echoed what I had felt about the Tour. Looking back, it really reflects what I feel was the purpose of the trip:

In a season on the blue roads, what had I accomplished? I hadn’t sailed the Atlantic in a washtub, or crossed the Gobi by goat cart, or bicycled to Cape Horn. In my own country, I had gone out, had met, had shared. I had stood as witness.

A non grammatical resolution this year: read more.
I’ve watched a lot of movies in the last few months, and I’d like to spend more of that time reading. I’m also going to better organize my RSS feeds to I can spend less time reading things I don’t need to. While it’s wonderful to read everything that comes through my feed reader, and often beautifully serendipitous, it’s also time consuming. I have a banister lined with books I need to start reading, and I intend to get through all of them in the coming year.

I have an ever growing pile of books which I need to start reading at some point. My problem is that I read quite a bit, but mostly online, and never pieces much longer than ten thousand words. When I’m away from my computer, while camping or on vacation, I have no trouble reading. I need to set aside uninterrupted time in order to read. I’ve never been able to pick up a book when I have some spare minutes, only to put it down a few moments later. I’m incredibly jealous of Nishi’s ability to do that. I’ve watched her go through several books totaling thousands of pages almost exclusively read in waiting rooms or while eating supper. Meanwhile I’m still halfway through a book I started six months ago. I think I may start trying (again) to give myself an hour every night to read, though in the past the endless potential for serendipity on the internet, or interesting conversations with friends have eaten that hour. I guess the real test is to see if my pile of unread books shrinks any between now and this time next year.