Hog Wild

Wow. I went hog-wild Saturday. I overdid it, you might say, and no doubt I’ll regret it in the morning. Yes, I went overboard with pure, unfettered abandon. Once every couple of weeks, all too frequently, I’ll do something like this. I keep telling myself I’m not going to do it, and yet time after time after time I go out and I do it again. I’m not proud of myself. But it’s done, and there’s nothing left to do.

No, I am not talking about food.

Nor am I talking about any other commonly talked-about forms of addiction.

During Saturday errands I dragged the Little One way out of our way to hit the county seat library. The daddy of all libraries in our little group of eighty or so linked libraries. And what’s worse: I went there with a list.

Yeah, I have about two dozen books that I own on a reading list backlog. Yes, I am currently reading the 338-page Lord of the World and the 427-page Triumph: The Power and the Glory of the Catholic Church. A stack of paperbacks some 30 inches high is staring balefully down at me from the adjacent bookcase. George R. R. Martin’s A Feast of Crows is calling out for me to open it before I forget the who’s who and what’s what of his medieval world. Plus, the whole purpose of this blog was not only to make daily writing a habit, but to calm down this hopping about tendency.

So I returned from that humongous library with 7 books in my arms. 7 books totaling 2,106 pages.

There’s no way in hell I’m gonna read all these books.

But here’s how I rationalize it. I like to have a book handy when the teevee’s on, ’cause a lot of what the wife and the girls watch, I’m not into. It can’t be a book that demands concentration, so it’s something I can usually skim through. With the exception of perhaps one of these books, I do not plan on reading them cover to cover. I pick and choose, see what’s interesting to me, scan the table of contents and scan the index, always keeping blogging, short story writing, and my future novels in mind.

So it’s justified. Kinda. Right?

In no particular order, here they are:


The Invented Reality, edited by Paul Watzlawick

The subtitle drew me in: How do we know what we believe we know? I find stuff like this incredibly fascinating, though stuff like this can easily be extremely dense and confusing. I put the onus on the writer. So I’ll give this one a shot. It appears to be of the school of thought that we substantially create our own reality, though I may just be creating a book entitled The Invented Reality that appears to be of the school of thought that we substantially create our own reality.

The Crack in the Cosmic Egg, by Joseph Chilton Pearce

Promises to challenge my constructs of my mind and my reality. Flirts dangerously, though, with hippie chic, being published in 1971 and mentioning Carlos Castaneda and Yaqui sorcerers prominently on the book jacket. But I’m game. At least for a chapter.

Classics for Pleasure, by Michael Dirda

Highly entertaining writer gives his one- or two-page take on ninety “classics.” I already read his analysis of She, by H. Rider Haggard, which I read last August and thoroughly enjoyed. Gonna use this by having Dirda convince me what others cool things I might not have previously considered cool are out there awaiting for me to read. (Yes, more books.)

Ideas Are Weapons, by Max Lerner

How awesome is the title of this 1939 magnum opus! How few people, especially high school and college kids, are blissfully unaware of this as they’re herded like sheep from one fad cause to the next. However, being a product of 1939, we lack a lot of probable essential background, such as reasons and consequences of the second world war or the abject moral failure of communism. There’s an essay “Hitler as Thinker”, for example. And a lot of the stuff seems to be Wilsonian kumbaya and about economics and legal issues. Can’t tell the ideology of the book for sure just yet, but I’ll know soon enough.

Archetypes: The Persistence of Unifying Patterns, by Elemire Zolla

Like the whole idea of archetypes, just have never found a book about the subject that wasn’t godawful boring. (The archetype of the boring book about archetypes … hmmm.)

Strange Matters: Undiscovered Ideas at the Frontiers of Space and Time, by Tom Siegfried

This book looks like it could be a great read. Quarks, anti-matter, symmetry, dark matter, the multiverse, electromagnetic waves, string theory, black holes, brane theory, Riemann geometry, a second dimension to time. Gotta love it! I’m just wary it will fall into the trap that 99.97 percent of all mass-marketed general physics books fall into: dumbing it down and spending to much time on the history of the ideas instead of the actual ideas themselves.

Entering Space: Creating a Spacefaring Civilization, by Robert Zubrin

This is probably the book I’ll read cover-to-cover. My wife bought me Zubrin’s excellent book The Case for Mars a few years back, and it was truly packed with lots of interesting and practical ideas. I’m looking for the same in this book. One of the things that’s sat a long time on my PC in natal form is an essay on “Why We Should Leave Earth for the Stars.” I am excited to think that Zubrin will give me lots more reasons.


Hi. My name is LE, and I’m a biblio-glutton.

Hi LE!