LHO Reading Habits

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All right. Two points here.

First, you can find anything on the Internet. Anything.

Second, I am really, really creeped out.

Last night, after everyone’s asleep, I’m reading this book on the JFK assassination entitled Case Closed. I’m about halfway through, and the book is focusing on the seventeen-month period between Oswald’s repatriation from the Soviet Union and the events of November 22, 1963. Oswald is an avid reader, despite his drop-out status and dyslexia, and frequents the local libraries on a weekly basis. A casual, throwaway footnote states that during the latter part of this period he moved away from political-ideological-oriented material and began devouring science fiction and spy novels.

That interested me. What SF did he read? Anything I’m familiar with?

No kidding, in less than five minutes of googling, I have a list of his library charges. You can see it, here.

He’s read just about every Ian Fleming novel, and seems to enjoy SF short story anthologies. If you look at the complete list, you realize that for a guy with at best an eighth-grade education, he tackled some very deep and penetrating works.

Still, it’s a little oogy to realize that we’ve both read:

Moonraker, by Ian Fleming
Brave New World, by Aldous Huxley
The Seven Pillars of Wisdom, by T. E. Lawrence
1984, by George Orwell
Nine Tomorrows, by Isaac Asimov
One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

and he’s read Ben Hur, by Lew Wallace! I have that all cued up to read this Advent season.

Man … Nine Tomorrows! How I loved that book as a kid. I must’ve read it a dozen times, maybe more. It’s on my Acquisitions List and way way overdue for a rereading.

I just read and reviewed Seven Pillars, here, and I did the Ian Fleming experience around the time I first started this blog, here.

The other three, Brave New World, 1984, and One Day, I read, as did you perhaps, way back in high school. The Huxley book is also on my Acquisitions List for a re-reading, as my intuition tells me that is more the threat to contemporary American society than the Orwell book.

Just a weird feeling. But then, I wonder, how many books read do you and I have in common …?